The Detective and the Devil - Lloyd Shepherd

The Detective and the Devil is the fourth in Shepherd's historical crime series featuring Charles Horton of the Thames River Police. It is 1815, the year of Waterloo, and Horton is back on Ratcliffe Highway (scene of his debut case in The English Monster, reviewed below), this time investigating the murder of an East India Company clerk and his family. Horton finds himself drawn into the inner workings of "John Company", in those days still a private company but nonetheless ruling an imperial continent, with its own army and indeed investigators. Horton finds himself increasing ostracised but gets funding to visit the Company's most remote and yet most secretive holding, the island of St Helena. Here he finds the secret which the Elizabethan magus John Dee seemed to refer to two hundred years earlier.

The St Helena scenes are greatly enlivened by the presence of Horton's wife Abigail, former nurse and now formidable autodidact. The flashbacks to the days of Dee are great fun. Overall, though, I was slightly disappointed. It certainly isn't as good as The English Monster. Equally, it isn't a bad book and it wouldn't necessarily put me off the next in the series when it comes.

The English Monster - Llloyd Shepherd

I wondered if Lloyd Shepherd had done yet another take on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, the first real English serial killings, known to all from De Quincey's Murder Consider'd and The Maul and the Pear Tree, the classic work from P D James and T A Critchley.

But no.  Shepherd has done something else entirely, a mash-up of fact (heavily based on James and Critchley, as he freely admits) and a separate storyline which begins 250 years earlier.  To say more would be to give the game away and I hate it when reviewers do that.  Suffice to say, Shepherd brings off his fantastical trick with considerable aplomb.

It has to be said, though, that the traditional stuff - the researched material which for most of the book sticks closely to the facts - works better than the imagined.  One reason for this is that his London is realised in such detail whereas other locations (Jamaica, South America) are poorly imagined.  I frankly have no idea where the Potosi Mine is or was.

Also, the monster becomes a monster with startling alacrity.  I would have liked more on the disintegration of his personality.

But I carp and I shouldn't, because The English Monster held me from start to finish.  If it didn't manage to horrify, it nevertheless intrigued and entertained.  And for a debut novelist, that's some achievement.  Recommended.