{"id":4597,"date":"2025-09-04T20:48:52","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T20:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=4597"},"modified":"2025-09-04T21:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T21:20:23","slug":"the-tumbling-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=4597","title":{"rendered":"The Tumbling Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the acknowledgments to this immersive debut, Walsh explains that she took a novel-writing course partly to convince herself not to write this series opener; readers will be happy that she went ahead anyway. Walsh drops us deep into the world of Minnie Ward, who writes music for Victorian London\u2019s Variety Palace Music Hall. The shabby venue hosts a plate spinner whose dressing room sounds like breaking crockery and sobs, a soprano who only sometimes hits a note, a wayward monkey that likes to have its way with the ventriloquist\u2019s dummy, and other downmarket wonders. When kindly detective Albert Easterbrook is hired to find the killer of a young woman who worked at the Palace, it brings him into Minnie\u2019s world. She\u2019s not content to sit on the sidelines of the investigation\u2014she knows far more than Albert does about the workings of her realm, not to mention that those he needs to question aren\u2019t going to open themselves up to a \u201ctoff.\u201d While working through his exasperation with headstrong Minnie, Albert begins to fall for her, a situation she rebuffs as it will never work out\u2014class divides loom large here. <strong>Their sometimes-parallel, sometimes-together work exposes both to dangers and horrors that will keep readers rapt; a side plot involving a serial killer who is terrorizing London closes the book and creates an opening for a sequel, which readers will eagerly await.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the acknowledgments to this immersive debut, Walsh explains that she took a novel-writing course partly to convince herself not to write this series opener; readers will be happy that&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[163,180,54,55,51,56],"class_list":["post-4597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-book-of-the-week","tag-debut","tag-historical","tag-mystery-detective","tag-thrillers","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Tumble-387x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Tumble.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}