The Devil’s Feast
It is 1842, and in this third outing for William Avery, late of the East India Company Army, and Jeremiah Blake, special inquiry agent, they have only a few days to find out how and why a poisoner is apparently targeting diners at the Liberal bastion of London’s Reform Club. We learn much of the endemic problem of food adulteration, and the easy availability of arsenic and other deadly poisons, and their commonplace use in everything from pest-control to pick-me-up tonics.
In spite of this theme, The Devil’s Feast is not a book to sit down to while hungry, with its lavish descriptions of meals, both great and small, cooked up by the Reform’s flamboyant “celebrity chef”, Alexis Soyer. Avery and Blake are such a good team, and their characters spark against and alongside each other so well, that I found the opening chapters, where Blake is “unavoidably detained” elsewhere, rather slow-moving. Much is made of their previous adventures in The Strangler Vine (HNR 71) and The Infidel Stain (HNR 73) and it would benefit the reader to be familiar with both books to appreciate fully the relationships between Blake and Avery and some of the other major characters here.
