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Summary
Summary
London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O'Donnell's Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances?
On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter's sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters--despite her employer's preference that she stick to a women's society column. As Inspector Cutter peels back the mystery layer by layer, he leads them all, at last, to the secrets that lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.
By turns smart, surprising, and impossible to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Irish writer O'Donnell's stellar historical, his stateside debut, 1893 London is abuzz with stories about the Spiriters, a shadowy group allegedly led by the wealthy Lord Strythe that's said to steal the souls of working-class women. One winter night, seamstress Esther Tull jumps to her death from a window in Strythe's home trying to escape from her usual work stitching intricate white gowns to the measurements of women she never sees. After Inspector Cutter of New Scotland Yard unsuccessfully seeks Strythe for questioning about Tull's death, Cutter connects the case to the plight of former millinery worker Angela Tatton, who speaks deliriously about dark air and brightness and is confined to a hospital. Rev. Herbert Neuilly, who lives in the same boarding house as Cutter, had ministered to Tatton and other poor, sickly, young women. Neuilly, like Strythe, has gone missing, and his nephew, Cambridge divinity student Gideon Bliss, arrives in London concerned for him. Cutter brings Bliss along when he travels to Vesper Sands, the home of Strythe's only living relation, hoping Strythe is hiding there. There they face mortal danger before learning the truth about the Spiriters. Making smart use of classic gothic imagery, O'Donnell excels at concocting eerie scenes. Yet he's also very funny, particularly in exchanges between the profane Cutter and the verbose but perceptive Bliss. Fans of Sarah Perry (not to mention Dickens and Wilkie Collins) will be captivated by this marvelous feat. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
Who is stealing souls in Whitechapel? O'Donnell brings Victorian London gloriously to life in an unorthodox confection of thrills and chills Paraic O'Donnell is a headache for those who like to organise their bookshelves by genre. His first novel, The Maker of Swans, was a gothic mashup of murder, magic, fairytale and literary fantasy. Linguistically inventive and rich with wordplay, it was a period piece that deliberately blurred the specifics of period. His second, The House on Vesper Sands, similarly defies categorisation, though this time we know exactly where we are: the novel unfolds in a vividly evoked England during the bitter winter of 1893. From the first pages it promises the same gothic spookiness as its predecessor; on a snowy night in February, a seamstress, Esther Tull, arrives at the Mayfair house of Lord Strythe to make final alterations to an intricately stitched white gown. As she follows the butler up the poorly lit stairs, she catches fragments of whispered conversations behind closed doors: "In this house a great deal happened that went unseen." Esther is in considerable pain, though she is careful not to show it. The butler locks her into the attic sewing room, as he has done many times before, and takes up a position outside. Alone and silently, Esther cleans the wound on her side so that the words she has sewn into her skin are clearly legible. Then she climbs on the windowsill and jumps. On the same night, a penniless and harassed Cambridge student, Gideon Bliss, arrives in London to stay with his uncle. When the old man is not at home, he is forced to seek shelter in a church where he discovers the prone body of Angie Tatton, a protege of his uncle's with whom he was once more than a little in love: dressed in nothing but a white shift and half delirious, she raves about brightness and black air until an unseen attacker clamps a rag over Gideon's mouth and he passes out. When he comes round she is gone. Desperate to find her, he attaches himself with some ingenuity to Inspector Cutter of Scotland Yard. He is not the only one looking for answers. Octavia Hillingdon, a society columnist seeking more serious work, has been leant on by her editor to look into the Spiriters, a shadowy band of criminals and staple of London's gutter press who are gruesomely claimed to be "stealing souls in Whitechapel". Octavia's reluctant investigations bring her ever closer to Gideon's own inquiries and finally, of course, to the mysterious house on Vesper Sands. This unorthodox confection is part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle, with a splash of Cold Comfort Farm Death throws an ever-looming shadow over proceedings - the book's sections are even named after parts of the Requiem Mass - but O'Donnell has no intention of serving up a standard Victorian chiller. Instead he has created a gloriously unorthodox confection, part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle, with a generous handful of police procedural and a splash of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. There is even a distinctly Hitchcockian interlude on a train. The genre-busting ambitions of The Maker of Swans divided critics. The House on Vesper Sands is structurally more satisfying and driven by a more compelling plot. O'Donnell has pulled off with brio something that might, in a lesser writer's hands, have fallen horribly flat: he has written a coherent and satisfying novel that is both disquietingly eerie and properly funny. It is impossible to read it without laughing out loud. Sharp, impatient and eye-wateringly brusque, Inspector Cutter powers through the pages, relentlessly squashing the assiduous, overeducated Gideon with his scathing remarks. The determinedly diplomatic accounts Gideon writes of his superior's interviews as he conducts his inquiries are comic works of art. As for the splendidly doughty Octavia, she is a Victorian Flora Poste, a bicycle-riding self-starter who brooks no resistance and, in pursuit of information, does not flinch from deploying "the method she knew best. She would encourage the right kind of people to say the wrong kind of thing." O'Donnell dispenses the waspish wit of the beau monde with Wildean relish. Yet none of this detracts from the unsettling strangeness of the book's central mystery. Through the filthy fog of the crowded London streets and out to the bleak wind-scoured Kent coastline, Angie's plight is unspooled. The dramatic denouement is striking and pleasingly unexpected. And while the laughs provide welcome respite from the darkness, their greater achievement is to bring a kind of bracing tenderness to a tale that might, in these #MeToo times, have felt voyeuristic and exploitative. Beneath its spooky exterior The House on Vesper Sands is a paean to the unshowy virtues of determination, diligence and loyalty. It is also a cracking good read. The book ends with an epilogue that could be dismissed as superfluous, except that it plainly lays the ground for a sequel. Regardless of where one ends up filing this novel on the bookshelves, that is excellent news for us all. - Clare Clark.
Kirkus Review
An orphan-turned-heiress, a university student, a down-on-his-heels clergyman, an inspector from Scotland Yard, a number of missing girls, and a host of high-society figures collide in this supernatural, gothic mystery. London, 1893. Octavia Hillingdon might be an heiress, but that's only because she and her brother, Georgie, were adopted by a newspaper magnate and given opportunities that would have otherwise been out of reach. Now, Octavia is a bicycle-riding Victorian lady journalist trying to uncover big stories even as she's limited to reporting on society events and gossipy pieces about the Spiriters by a difficult editor. Elf--that is, the Most Honourable Marquess of Hartington--is her friend and party sidekick, winnowing out gossipy tidbits for her. Gideon Bliss is an exceedingly poor university student in Cambridge who drops everything to rush to London after receiving a cryptic letter from his clergyman uncle about impending danger, yet he secretly hopes to once again meet up with his beloved Angela. The volatile Inspector Cutter handles special cases dealing with the occult at Scotland Yard. The lives of all these characters and more collide over the course of a few days in February: Gideon stumbles upon Angela--wearing a thin white shift and barely lucid--before the altar in an empty church, but he is drugged, she is taken, and he seeks Inspector Cutter's help. A seamstress jumps to her death from a window of Lord Strythe's London home, the gentleman himself disappears, and Olivia tries to find out why. Author O'Donnell carefully unspools the gothic creepiness of his story, teasing the reader with tidbits of information that raise more questions than they answer: Just who are the Spiriters? What are they doing with the young girls who go missing? How is the seamstress's suicide related to the death of the Inspector's wife? In the end, all the pieces fit together. An intriguing, unexpected gothic mashup with elements of Dorothy Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Josephine Tey. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.