Season of Darkness

By Cora Harrison

Introducing Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as an unusual detective duo in the first of a brand-new Victorian mystery series.

When Inspector Field shows his friend Charles Dickens the body of a young woman dragged from the River Thames, he cannot have foreseen that the famous author would immediately recognize the victim as Isabella Gordon, a housemaid he had tried to help through his charity. Nor that Dickens and his fellow writer Wilkie Collins would determine to find out who killed her.

Who was Isabella blackmailing, and why? Led on by fragments of a journal discovered by Isabella’s friend Sesina, the two men track the murdered girl’s journeys from Greenwich to Snow Hill, from Smithfield Market to St Bartholomews, and put their wits to work on uncovering her past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House Publishers
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781448302154

Cora Harrison

Cora Harrison turned to writing historical fiction after she retired from teaching to live on a farm near the Burren in the west of Ireland. As well as the Reverend Mother series, she is the author of the 'Mara' series of Celtic mysteries, set in sixteenth-century Ireland, and the new Gaslight mystery series set in Victorian London. www.coraharrison.com

Reviews for Season of Darkness

[pennykaplan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The have nots in Victorian England populated this mystery of the brutal death of an orphan servant girl and it’s investigation by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and another servant girl. Well done but the plot has lots of red herrings and holes.

[vesper1931 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are shown a body by Dickens friend Inspector Field. The body had been retrieved from the Thames, unknown, and so her death will probably go unsolved. But Dickens knows her as someone once resident in Urania Cottage, a home for fallen women. Both authors decide to investigate, helped, by Anna Marie Sesina, friend to the dead female, Isabelle Gordon.
The story is related from two points of view, Sesina and Collins.
I enjoyed this historical mystery, it was well-written, though at times a bit slow-paced, and the characters are portrayed well. Overall a good solid start to what I hope is a new series.
a NetGalley Book