Eliza Mace (Eliza Mace Mysteries)
In the first book of a Victorian mystery series, set in the 1870s, the 16-year-old Eliza Mace is in a fix. Her warring parents do not support her, and her kindly uncle, James, does not have the influence to intervene. Eliza is also growing up fast, which is bringing her unwanted and unwelcome attention. On top of that, the family is in severe financial straits and their manor house, on the Welsh borders, is crumbling. Then her unpleasant and at times violent father disappears. Eliza teams up with a new Welsh police constable, Dafydd Pritchard. It won’t be easy to find out who murdered her father, as he has made many enemies. But she is determined to search for the truth – even as the world she has known collapses around her.
Eliza Mace is set in hill country, and is well described, with the main character (and her new sidekick) being well drawn. For fans of Victorian detective series, this is highly recommended, but it may contain a tad too much backstory for some readers, with the first third of the novel effectively setting the scene not only for this book, but for the series. However, this reader felt it was well-plotted and that it gave a real sense of how young women of Eliza’s class were trapped within restrictive systems that left them unable to develop. Eliza is made of strong stuff, and the ending shows that she has the character to pursue her independence. The novel gives a real sense of class- and sex-based restrictions, whereas the young Eliza speaks for a new generation of women who foreshadow the rise of the Suffragettes thirty years later. This is a classy origin story for a series that will no doubt be entertaining, but also carry a political edge.
