The House on Vesper Sands
London in the cold winter of 1893, and there have been puzzling reports of the souls of young women of the teeming capital having been stolen by mysterious entities, known as the Spiriters. The story is pursued by two main storylines and characters: Gideon Bliss & Octavia Hillingdon. Bliss is an impoverished student at Cambridge, reading Divinity in advance of becoming a clergyman. He is an orphan and is supported by a distant uncle, Herbert Neuilly. When he is summoned to London to see his uncle, he finds he has disappeared. Gideon forms an unlikely working partnership with Inspector Cutter of Scotland Yard’s CID, a superbly-delineated gruff personality who, intentionally or not on the part of the author, steals the show as the best character in the novel. Meanwhile, Octavia is a privileged young woman, with access to the upper echelons of London society, but she works, unusually for her sex, as a reporter on a newspaper The Mayfair Gazette. Their stories merge over the sudden disappearance of Lord Strythe and the continuing disappearances of young females, one of whom is especially close to Gideon’s heart. A sinister plot is gradually unveiled that goes to the upper echelons of London society.
The reader is only allowed to understand elements of the plot as the narrative unfolds; the story does seem a little fragmented at times, with this reviewer having to consciously recall what had happened to the main characters in previous chapters, and it took a long while before I was fully absorbed into the story. Nevertheless it is a splendid historical gothic fantasy and very well told, with characters that resonate with life and humour. Some of the phrases the characters use appear a little too contemporary for 19th-century London—a minor quibble.
