April 20, 2020
Set in Victorian London, Reeve’s well-crafted sequel to 2019’s Half Moon Street finds Leo Stanhope, formerly Lottie Pritchard, involved in another thought-provoking murder case. A few days after Dora Hannigan, accompanied by her two children, Aidan and Ciara, makes a small purchase at the pharmacy owned by Leo’s landlord, the police bring Leo to a club for political radicals, where Dora’s corpse has been found. Since Leo’s name and address are on Dora’s body, they doubt his claim that she’s a stranger. As Leo is leaving, he’s accosted by a childhood acquaintance, a wealthy industrialist’s radical son, who threatens to reveal his secret—that Leo was born and raised as female—if Leo won’t provide him with an alibi. Afraid of being prosecuted or committed to an asylum, Leo agrees to do so, fueling police suspicion further. Meanwhile, Aidan and Ciara, now homeless, return to the pharmacy, the last place they visited before Dora’s death. Leo grows increasingly attached to the children as he pursues the killer, who Ciara insists is a lion. In this nicely plotted puzzle, Reeve movingly explores Leo’s inner life. Readers will hope he’ll return soon.
May 1, 2020
Readers will welcome this second Victorian thriller (following Half Moon Street, 2019) starring Leo Stanhope, who has a closely guarded secret: he is a trans man. If he were to be found out, he would be convicted of sexual offenses and fraud, and subjected to grotesque physical therapy. As if this weren't bad enough, he finds himself a suspect in the murder of a woman whom he had met once casually. The dead woman leaves two small children who wind up in Leo's unofficial care as he strives to learn the identity of the murderer. The police, who seem borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes tale, are, of course, no help. Leo himself is no Holmes, but he is clever and persistent, despite being blackmailed by the son of a wealthy magnate, whose mistress was the dead woman. The brew gets positively heady when the author tosses in some anarchists and socialists and a red herring or two. The result is a well-plotted and diverting mystery, which, happily, is part of a series. Volume three is forthcoming.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)