The Beholders
1878: The body of a boy is pulled from the river Thames. He is suspected to be the missing child of Liberal MP Ralph Gethin. The author relates this via graphic newspaper headlines, shattering any notion that what follows may be an easy or comfortable read. Agog for the disclosure on which the grisly case may hinge, one is caught in a deeply disturbing vortex of Victorian intrigue from the very opening page of this exceptional gothic thriller.
A bizarre tale hypnotically unfurls, its sticky tendrils tugging its witness inescapably into a labyrinth of shadows and sordid secrets. Therein lies a hydra-headed monster: a composite of everything putrid underlying the society of the time. Told through the pencil-scrawled diary of Harriet Watkins, an iron-willed housemaid who staunchly refuses victimhood no matter what her lot, there is hell and damnation, persecution and salvation, martyrdom, sacrifice and redemption etched into pages and lives with heart-stopping, gut-wrenching precision.
Perspectives are repeatedly tipped giddily onto their heads before glimmers of truth can be gathered as offerings to the innocent, scraps of light against a suffocating backdrop of overwhelming vileness. Hester Musson’s dramatic timing is impeccable and harrowing, leaving the reader fairly slavering to discover the fate of Watkins and her glamourous, highly-strung mistress – and the answer to the mystery that threads through the narrative like smoke from a heaped bonfire of naïve assumptions. The dénouement is a blazing beacon, the more powerful for its juxtaposition against the stench of corruption out of which it is born, its message searing into the soul for all time: the assurance that there are angels among us indeed.
A relentlessly claustrophobic nightmare, unquestionably a jewel of the genre. You will need to step outside to gulp at the air long before the final page.
