If you’re interested in nineteenth-century historical crime fiction, take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; available now! Or if you’re a fan of the Scottish capital, check out my short story on Kindle, Researcher Wanted (free on Kindle Unlimited).

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Review

I read this some time ago but was reminded of it by a new ARC (to be reviewed soon), so thought I should pick this back up and properly review it here.

There are no end of Edinburgh-based modern crime stories (Ian Rankin’s Rebus topping them all), but as the home of Dr Joseph Bell (the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes), as well as the home of infamous bodysnatchers Burke and Hare earlier in the century, Victorian Edinburgh is also a prime location for historical crime fiction. This series-opener was published around the same time as Ambrose Parry’s The Way of All Flesh (2018) and Kaite Welsh’s The Wages of Sin (2017) (which I should also probably review at some point).

Arthur Conan Doyle features as a character here, as does Sophia Jex-Blake, and so although Lawrence’s series focuses on a professional protagonist, Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton, she joins Welsh and Parry in their interest in in women’s entry into the professions (and specifically the medical profession). Hamilton works with his photographer aunt and a very well-informed librarian in the sidekick roles, so although we do have a professional police officer front and centre, we still enjoy the more amateur detective work that so often plays well in this era.

Like many stories set in the Victorian period, this one takes an interest in sexual violence, which I increasingly find a little tiresome, and the who of the ‘dunnit’ was not so heavily concealed as it might have been. Still, Lawrence draws some engaging and compelling characters with good pacing throughout, making this very readable. With a certain ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ angle to the tale, it plays too with that work of yet another famous Edinburghian, Robert Louis Stevenson, and I did appreciate the effort that had gone into drawing these allusions. That being said, it is not the most historically accurate Victorianist fiction I’ve read! We can all be forgiven the occasional anachronism in the interests of plot or readerly comfort, but it is a story that might resonate more with a one-time tourist than anyone with stronger Edinburgh links.

I confess I did not read the second and third entries in the series (Edinburgh Dusk and Edinburgh Midnight), but I would be interested in reading Lawrence’s US-based Victorian historical crime stories!

See also

These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• Ambrose Parry’s Edinburgh-based series
• The Wages of Sin (Kaite Welsh)

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Keen on nineteenth-century historical crime fiction? Take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: available now! Or if you’re a fan of the Scottish capital, check out my short story on Kindle, Researcher Wanted (free on Kindle Unlimited).