Women Sleuths

Brilliant though he is, Charles Labelye despairs that his years-long toil, the construction of the second bridge over London’s Thames, will ever be finished. Cracks and falling masonry have bedeviled Westminster bridge and public rumors abound that it is cursed. That seems true when a girl’s body is found in an alcove on the bridge, her forehead split. The crime could be swept away—just another street urchin who met an anonymous, grisly end—but it comes to the attention of a poor yet genteel young woman, Sarah Fielding, novelist and sister of the more-famous Henry. At the same time, her walks around London with her shameful umbrella—it shows that one cannot afford transportation when it rains—lead her to another desperately poor child. Soivitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking,” is Sarah’s motto, but in this case, running is the key, as the child is being pursued for murder. Finding out who is behind the crimes drops Sarah and readers into a dangerous, stinking, chaotic nineteenth century London and a fast moving mystery with a whip-smart and kind protagonist striding toward justice. For all who love historical fiction underpinned by thorough research and for fans of Tracey Enerson Wood’s The Engineer’s Wife, which stars Emily Warren Roebling, who oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband became ill from working in the caissons invented by Charles Labelye.—Henrietta Thornton