Hitchens Hits Hard: A New Collection

I confess that Christopher Hitchens’ erudition and wit can sometimes be intimidating: His writing is just so damned smart, caustic, and rhetorically relentless. Imagine an Oxford-educated Robin Williams at warp speed with, I guess, a First in Classics, perhaps, or whatever degree is most impressive to the hoi polloi (and yes, I know, the British just say hoi polloi). 

So I recommend this book of previously uncollected essays and reviews, some of them quite scathing, to be sampled slowly, like an 16-year-old Lagavulin. Because this stuff is definitely peaty.

Consider the essay titled “Spanking” in which Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher made Hitchens lose “all independent volition” when they met at a book party. He actually obeyed when she ordered him to bow lower and lower until she could “thwack” him on the butt.  Yes, it was with rolled-up papers, but still. . . .

The opening of that piece is a treasure house of finely-tuned mockery:

Sometimes in the late autumn of 1977, I went to a book party that was held in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords. Why I went I can’t think–the volume was some piece of unreadable bufferdom* extruded by Lord Butler, who as “Rab” had never in his life done anything to live down the sobriquet “flabby-faced old coward.” He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise.

I thought instantly of the grotesque bejeweled tortoise that Rex Mottrom gave Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.

There’s much to feast on here, like the gimlet-eyed portrait of Princess Margaret having the full weight of the British government suppress her quite ordinary need for love and deny her marriage to the divorced man she loved.  It’s hard to read those sad, boozy pages without seeing Lesley Manville’s riveting performance–the glamor and clamor–in The Crown. Hitchens has no love for royalty and its discontents and while the essay is brutal, it’s also surprisingly compassionate.

The book is heavily political from politics in the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon years to the sexual hypocrisy of J. Edgar Hoover.  Hitchens hated all four men, and gives readers good reasons why.

And people who feel Barbie was “snubbed” might find the surprising “At the Oscars” illuminating. Or infuriating.  Either way, it’s masterful reportage and analysis.

One fascinating feature of the book is published letters responding to complaints about various articles of his. In Hitchens’ ripostes, he often seems to be dueling an unarmed–or at least unskilled–opponent.

Hitchens’ essays frequently quote Oscar Wilde  and I found myself deeply grateful for his reference in one essay to a master of humor almost equal to Wilde: H.H. Munro who wrote under then pen name of “Saki.” Saki’s Edwardian tales are priceless in their dissection of the period’s arrogance and self-love. Read them when the world is too much with you, late or soon.

The author was known by many people as “Hitch” and the publishers went with a punning title and cover, but honestly, a stiletto or rapier would have been a more fitting implement.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other newspapers as well as for NPR stations in Michigan.  Guests on his interview show on Lansing Public Radio included Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes.

*the state of being foolish, old-fashioned, and incompetent

Why Is China’s Genocide Ignored? Especially by U.S. Faculty & Students?

Over more than a decade, the Chinese government has been grossly persecuting Muslims in the western region of Xianjiang. An officially-recognized ethnic minority of between 11-13 million people, the Uyghurs speak a Turkic language. As second-class citizens, they have seen their lives grow more tenuous, constricted, desolate and desperate as the Chinese have spun ugly new twists on the Nazi persecution of Jews and Soviet-style surveillance.

Supposedly protecting China from terrorists, Chinese persecution has involved demeaning the Uyghurs as less than human; endless interrogations over things as minor as speaking to someone abroad on the phone–and even arresting those people; denying them passports; arresting and “disappearing” people who have passports; seizing anything related to Islam like Korans, Islamic books, and prayer rugs; forcing people to change their Muslim names and expensively register the change in newspapers; arbitrarily arresting and detaining a million people in slave labor camps. Uyghurs have even been forced to renounce Islam and praise Communism in word and song. And they have to pay for the installation of state surveillance cameras on their apartment buildings.

People just disappear, and family and friends don’t know where they are or if they’re even alive. Torture has been employed against Uyghurs in prisons and camps, and so is forced sterilization of some women. The aim is to terrorize this population and destroy their culture. The oppression extends beyond their region: Uyghurs who have come to Beijing for any number of reasons cannot stay in ordinary Chinese hotels but are ghettoized in Uyghur hotels.

Much of this is detailed soberly but powerfully by renowned Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil in his memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night.  In his devastating short book he details his three-year imprisonment after trying to travel outside of China, along with endless interviews and bureaucracy that go beyond Kafkaesque. Chinese surveillance of its people who all have ID cards is highly sophisticated, strict, far-reaching, and inexorable. And the Uyghurs aren’t just spied on, they’re fingerprinted, forced to give blood samples, and photographed extensively via computers for facial advanced recognition.

The author tells the stories of friends who almost died trying to get to freedom in the West and his own attempts to escape China with his family are heartbreaking, the stuff of a thriller. Luckily, he made it out.

In one of the most haunting passages, he and his wife are interrogated in a basement office where they pass by prison cells, bloodstained floors, and a chair with straps meant to immobilize people being tortured. Waiting anxiously to be summoned downstairs, they had heard a man crying out in pain–until a steel door to the stairs was shut by police.

Many colleges and universities around the U.S. seem to think that they should be making foreign policy declarations even though their central mission is education. Given that drive and the uproar about the war in Gaza, it’s shocking that when it comes to China, Muslims there do not seem to count despite their horrendous suffering–and the fact that the U.S. has declared what is happened in China to be genocide.

Michigan State University is a sad example with its furious meetings about the war in Gaza. Whatever lies behind student and faculty silence about the Uyghurs, the institutional silence could be due to the fact that MSU has long-standing and apparently remunerative ties with China. You have to wonder if other universities have similar reasons for shamefully ignoring the truth. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is a former book reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Downton Shabby

Brandy Schillace’s debut mystery The Framed Women of Ardmore House is a classic fish-out-of-water crime novel.  Jo Jones may have a drab name but she’s a fascinating woman: autistic, divorced, broke, an editor who loves mysteries and classic literature, and the surprised inheritor of an English country mansion.

It’s not remotely a show place. The once-magnificent gardens are dilapidated and the house is a wreck: there’s a major roof leak, filth, mold, and water damage throughout, and it’s all overseen by a creepy caretaker who has boundary issues. 

Not surprisingly, he’s soon dead with Jo as the prime suspect because they’ve argued and she had him fired. As you might expect from an author who’s been a professor of Gothic Literature, the lights often go out in this book and there’s a mysterious portrait that Jo finds hanging in the wrong place before it disappears completely. The hunt is on!  Who was the woman, who stole the portrait and why? That’s Jo’s mission while the police zero in on her  as the murderer because of her barbed interactions with the caretaker.

Schillace has skillfully made Jo’s autism turn her into a suspect because her behavior is awkward to say the least. She seems to those around her either strangely detached and unemotional when you’d expect the opposite–but she can also flare up and panic. She can ramble and is frequently inappropriate in her questions and answers. As a stranger who is truly strange in the eyes of almost everyone in town, Jo is a magnet for suspicion. 

But Jo has a keen memory that makes her a terrific amateur sleuth even if she sometimes has trouble reading people. Conversely, she can see connections that other people can’t and can make those connections faster. 

Book lovers of all kinds will relate to her because she lives in books, noting “Always, I love words. The way they look and feel and smell. It’s hard to explain. Words have just always been my people. And I don’t forget them after I read them.”

This is a charming mystery with bite and filled with wonderful observations. Like these about the stodgy detective investigating the murder: 

He did not want to be in the incident room on a Saturday. He wanted to go for a walk with the dog he didn’t have (but kept meaning to get) and have a pint somewhere with real food and the general hum of humans.  Murders were damned inconvenient.

That parenthesis is delicious and so is that last line worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, though I suppose he would have used “dashed.”

With plenty of suspects, the book is a fine blend of darkness and light and will make an entertaining weekend read wherever you are.  ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Jerusalem Report and several NPR stations in Michigan. His suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award finalist.

The Secret Life of Roman Emperors

Rather than write a chronological study of the seemingly dozens of emperors who followed the end of the Roman Republic, noted scholar Mary Beard has done something very different and far more original.

She’s organized her lavishly illustrated and highly entertaining book around obvious but fascinating themes: their loves, their food, their slaves, their famous or infamous acts, their assassinations and they people they had executed, the palaces and temples they built, their families and rivals, their courtiers good and bad, the women and men in their beds that they loved or hated or simply disposed of when they thought the time was right.

We have inherited lots of potentially dubious stories about who they all were, whether the fiendish Caligula or the noble Hadrian, but Beard  wants to cut through all the myths, good and bad, and all the images we have from films or paintings and any other sources.  As she puts it so trenchantly:

The image of Roman emperors that has come down to us is a complicated and multilayered construction: a glorious combination of hard historical evidence, spin, political invention and reinvention, fantasies of power, and the projection of Roman (and some modern) anxieties. It makes the “real” emperor hard to pin down.

But Beard does her very best at assessing whether tales of seduction, murder, incest, mind-boggling banquets can be determined to be real, fantasies, propaganda, rumor, or libel. Perhaps many of these stories are more about how the emperors were perceived, how their roles were conceived of by contemporary poets and historians, and how they thought about themselves?  You’ll be surprised that some emperors actually felt victimized by living in the midst of a “court culture of deference, deceit, and dystopia.”

Bread is never anything less than witty, especially when she cleverly employs  contemporary labels like “microaggressions.”  The book is dense with fact and fancy, a beautiful survey of historical remains around the Mediterranean that tell the stories of these famous and forgettable men.  Beard does her best to explore the lives of the vast array of slaves with myriad specialties and the “bureaucrats” who were surprisingly few and far between in helping run a gigantic empire.

Foodies will be intrigued to learn that much of what he think we know about their banquets may be bogus, but the layout of their dining rooms with streams and waterfalls and dishes sailed across to their couches is amazing.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, access to emperors was a lot more available than we might think and they often were called upon to decide on legal matters as petty (in their terms) as the unpaid rental of a cow. Beard also has a fascinating chapter on what kind or work emperors actually did, and elsewhere explains that our movies that show crazed, mixed-gender crowds at the Coliseum are dead wrong.  Women were relegated to the nosebleed section along with slaves, and there was a strict dress code and class separation.  The audience for the savagery was as polite, she says, as formally-attired opera goers.

This is an intimate but encyclopedic study of an Ancient Rome under its many emperors as bedazzling, bewildering, besotted with its own power–but delightfully quirky, nitty-gritty, and surprisingly recognizable and like our own oddly imperial times.  This is a book to savor and marvel at for its lightly-worn erudition and its revelation of relics of Rome you’ve likely never read about. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for Salon, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, and Jerusalem Report.

Surprising Thriller in Poland

Poland, a Green Land novel by the renowned Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, surprisingly reads like a slow burn thriller.

The adult son of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors who live in Tel-Aviv, Jakov Fein quixotically decides after their death that he wants to visit the little village they had such fond memories of.  That is, memories from before they escaping a gruesome Nazi massacre. You’d be right to wonder why. Fein never felt connected to them and he’s estranged from his wife and two daughters so he’s clearly more than looking for his past: maybe what he learns there can be a guide to his future.\

Like a Gothic novel, when he arrives in Krakow and tells people where he’s headed, he’s uniformly warned off: “There’s nothing there.”  Even the cart driver taking him there seems to find his mission pointless.

Are they right?  Do they mean well?

At first, things seem rosy on the edge of the village.  He takes a room in a farmhouse with a welcoming widow, Magda, who lovingly cooks for him, treats him well, and in a major surprise, turns out to have known his family when she was a little girl.

Fein falls in love with his host and in love with the green fields, the woods and the flowing river–all of which seem so different from Israel.  He fills in more and more gaps in the lives his parents never quite shared with him, learns family history and seems to be blossoming in some strange way.

But things turn ominous very soon as the locals find out he’s Jewish.  They alternate between praise for Israelis as strong and deep-seated antisemitic venom and hatred.  He learns a lot, risks a lot, and you wonder if he’ll make it out alive.

The book’s strength is the tension that builds and the way it reads like a novel of suspense as well as some kind of fable.  That latter aspect is reinforced by all the times the author describes Fein’s.  Sadly, they don’t work: they feel way too long, too specific in detail and dialogue to actually come across as dreams.  Some readers may get bored because they slow the narrative way down.

Too often the characters in this book, no matter who they are, speak about Fate, Life, God, Jews, History, Poland, War in almost stilted, oracular fashion and it seems too much like speechifying.

I’ve read many of the late author’s books and if you want to sample him, Badenheim 1939 is truly wonderful.  This book doesn’t equal its power and depth.  ★★★
Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money and twenty-six other books in genres from memoir to mystery.

Brilliant, Scary Satire

As a book reviewer, you can often feel like you’re on a high-speed train missing all the terrific possible stops along your route. People wherever you go mention books that you somehow never got to read read or read about because you’re too damned busy reading and reviewing other books. 

Back when I worked for half a dozen different publications, I remember weeks where I was reviewing three or more books on deadline and either reading or writing with no break whatsoever. Okay, I did eat and go to the john.  And maybe hit the gym, but in my head I was always thinking about the next review–and the one after that–and the one after that.

So I confess I missed the bravos for The Other Black Girl, but I am here to tell you that it is a laugh-out-loud, gorgeously written, and effing brilliant satire of the publishing world–and much more.  I love this powerful novel and I envy the author her style, her humor, her satire, her poise.  She is stone cold amazing. And for those readers who think MFA programs turn out cookie-cutter writers, guess again.  She is an original.

The set-up is great: Nella, whose name recalls the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, is the only Black editorial assistant in the prestigious Wagner publishing house.  A publisher whose mail room staff is all people of color but whose editorial, art, and publicity staff are all uniformly white, many of them quite privileged.  Nella’s little cubicle is a lonely place, and “blacksplaining” cultural realities and events to her White colleagues often works her last nerve. 

She’s not a legacy hire and though her family was comfortable, they weren’t wealthy and that helps isolate her even more–at least in her own mind.  She’s also not happy being stuck at a low pay grade, though she loves the work, most of the time.  Enter Hazel, a much hipper Black editorial assistant with whom she feels she can (and should) bond, but things quickly get weird, competitive, and creepy in the extreme.

The author worked at Knopf for three years so she has an inside track on creating a workplace filled with kooks and quirks, competition, hypocrisy and back stabbing.    Like so many organizations today, Wagner makes feeble attempts to embrace diversity and the author’s wit here as elsewhere is stiletto-sharp.  The satire is never laid on too thick, however, and Nella is a wise, weary hero to admire and root for.

And so you feel you’re deep in a novel about workplace competition, Black solidarity and White cluelessness/condescension–until the book expands way beyond what you might expect when we learn the meaning of the title.  That’s when the book plunges deep into an alternate, hair-raising reality that’s a spoof conspiracy theorizing.  The  register becomes fantasy-horror and it’s a dazzling switch. I was glad that I put everything aside this weekend to read the book straight through.  The Other Black Girl is a knockout debut.  ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael, author, editor, and teacher, is a prize-winning publishing veteran.  His 27 books span genres from memoir to mystery.

A Vivid Spy Story

This is the biography of a wildly improbable life: born into wealth and privilege, Margaret Harrison changed careers from society news reporter to spy. That’s right, fluent in German, she was a spy for American military intelligence in post-WWI Germany. Harrison was tasked with taking the mood of the country from top to bottom. She did so, moving through a country filled with violence and practically dodging bullets in Berlin as various factions fought each other for control.

When she was assigned to discover what was really going on in Bolshevik Russia, Harrison learned Russian and sneaked into that country of vast convulsions, which was at war with Poland. She had no permission, but she had charm and wit and could think fast.  Harrison was totally clear-headed about the risk of crossing over from Poland:

She was aware that once she reached the Russian side, she would have no one to turn to for help: no American diplomats had stayed in the country, no foreign embassies remained to represent her; she had no way to send a message out, and no one she knew to receive a message inside. She would be at the mercy of a dangerous adversary.

Hobnobbing with the literati and enjoying Moscow’s cultural richness amid the shortages of food and just about everything else didn’t last. She was forced to spy for the Cheka, the secret police–but that didn’t last, either. The book tips over into a sort of horror story when she’s arrested and imprisoned for well over a year in shocking, grotesque conditions that severely undermined her health–but didn’t diminish her spirit. 

Multilingual, she was praised by spymasters for the best intelligence from Russia any agent was supplying, and as a media sensation, Harrison became a successful lecturer about Russian reality and her prison experiences. She left out being a double agent. Craving “hardships and adventures,” she went on to get more than her share as a reporter and occasional spy in Japan, Siberia, China, Korea, and Mongolia. Her energy is almost exhausting to contemplate, and the most astonishing episodes are worthy of an Indiana Jones reboot: a film she helped finance and starred in was set in an extremely remote part of Persia. 

Flirting with Danger is filled with a blizzard of famous figures: politicians, artists, and writers from Winston Churchill to Emma Goldman and Maxim Gorky. The author is a supremely confidant storyteller, but she deserved a careful copyeditor who, for instance, was aware that German nouns are capitalized and knew that Germany was not “under authoritarian rule” in 1924. She also needed an editor who could have reined in the profusion of adjectives, many over-long sentences, excessive attention to meals, and florid phrases like this one: “her eyes danced like clouds in a blazing sky.”

It’s also disturbing that the author twice labels gays and lesbians in 1919 Berlin as “sinister” when this was a time of unprecedented freedom and openness for that community. The portrait of Berlin seems skewed, perhaps reflecting Harrison’s own apparent prudishness, and readers will find a much more nuanced assessment of the city right after WWI in Claire McKay’s Life and Death in Berlin.

All the same, Flirting with Danger is a memorable book about an unforgettable woman.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for the Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications.  Biography is one of his favorite genres and he recently reviewed The Art Thief.

A New Kind of War

Manipulated into declaring war on Prussia in 1870, ailing and criminally indecisive Napoleon III of France was quickly defeated and captured on the battlefield in a disastrous few months that led to the final unification of northern and southern Germany and the creation of Imperial Germany.

The author tells this familiar story with verve, relying on diaries and letters from ordinary soldiers to military commanders and royalty.  Enthusiasm was high on both sides but the Germans clearly outdid the French military in well-defined battle plans and overall strategy. Just as important, their leaders were in good health while Napoleon III was ill, uncertain, and issued last-minute changes that were confusing.

The French lines of communication were murky and French retreats were mostly chaotic while German advances were far better organized.  The French had better rifles and an early version of the machine gun, but the German armies had bigger and deadlier cannons.  Both sides used railroads to move troops and supplies, but the Prussian did so far more efficiently and their generals had recent experience fighting the Danes and the Austrians.

Though the term “shell shock” wasn’t invented yet, it’s clear that troops on both sides were traumatized by the piled-up bodies of dead and wounded in numbers that had never been seen before. Likewise, no city had ever been shelled so constantly and repeatedly as Strasbourg which at one point was hit every twenty seconds by powerful explosives, and the emotional toll on its citizens was severe.  And the random shelling of Paris seems a presage of the war in Ukraine.

There are many fascinating pages on the varied reactions around France to Napoleon III’s surrender and the fate of his mammoth army. And the tales of extortion and atrocities committed by troops from various German states in response to the slightest resistance are shocking.  The author has an eye for surprising details, like the fact that there was water under the Paris Opera, discovered after drilling through the foundation, and the author claim helped inspire The Phantom of the Opera novel by Gaston Leroux.

As engaging as it is, the book could have been more reader-friendly.  Maps are gathered at the front so you need to keep paging back to refer to them when following the specific movements of troops in battle–or trying to follow them.  None of the maps show the placement and progress of actual armies as you’d expect from a book so keenly focused on a war.

The chapter on the Prussian sieges of Metz and Strasbourg badly needed plans of the complex fortifications.  Just as frustrating, the book lacks a map of the French départments.  You have to go to Google to figure out where there is partisan activity, for instance, when the Germans besiege Paris.  Likewise when the author talks about where people flee to avoid the German and where exactly German atrocities take place.  There are many handsome period illustrations, but their labels are at the back of the book, so if you don’t want to interrupt your reading, you have to guess what they refer to.

Nevertheless, this is a thorough and illuminating study of  a war that created a gigantic pivot in world history.  ★★★

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and his reviews have appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Washington post, The Huffington Post and Salon.

 

Family Drama and Mystery

Two very different families are central to the plot in Nina Simon’s debut mystery Mother-Daughter Murder Night, and given the recent fires in California, it’s not surprising that fire is just as pivotal.

Fire, and fiery women, even if they’re cool on the outside. Lana Rubicon is a super-stylish “diamond-hard” realtor who’s been forced out of work and has retreated from chic, high-energy LA to a small town up the coast. She moves in with her somewhat estranged daughter Beth needing support during cancer treatment. Will this highly critical woman work Beth’s last nerve? And where does her granddaughter fit into the family geometry?

The other family’s toughest member is wealthy Diana Whiteacre whose first husband was a young duke and whose ailing father is a local landowner. His death pits her and Martin, her Maserati-driving brother, against each other since they have very different dreams for the ranch that they’ll inherit. Martin’s a bit too smooth for his own good.

The men in this novel are either pushy-verging-on-aggressive, or less than competent in contrast to the deeply resourceful women of all ages. And that’s just fine, since Lana’s barbed view of men and power permeates the story and she offers a steady supply of wit and hard-earned wisdom.

There are some minor mysteries tied into the main one that involves two murders and those aren’t too hard to unravel (and neither is the murder weapon), but Simon does a good job of shifting suspicion back and forth among various characters as Lana, Beth and Jack become embroiled in solving the crimes. At great risk to themselves, of course.

Simon’s people are real, her prose is taut especially when describing pain and physical peril, and she excels at making you feel transported to places you’ve never seen. Here’s Lana gazing out a window late at night:

The moon was full above the slough, and the whole world looked flattened out in grayscale wispy clouds, grainy fields, fast-moving current.  Glints of moonlight bounced off the water where harbor seals surfaced, hunting crabs along the mud flat that edged the slice of beach behind the house.

Simon cleverly gave Lana a very rare American surname, Rubicon, to recall the famous decision Julius Caesar made when he crossed the river of that name in 49 B.C.E, breaking Roman law to bring troops into Italy for the first time. The characters in Mother-Daughter Murder Night keep crossing one kind of boundary or another and that makes for an entertaining read.

Simon’s afterword adds another layer to everything in the book, since she wrote the novel when her mother developed lung cancer and they both needed distraction and a project. As such, it’s a powerful gift.  ★★★★

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries set in the hothouse world of academia.

The Regency Jason Bourne is Back

 

C.S. Harris is a fantastic novelist. Her characters are richly observed, her dialogue is evocative, her plots are exceedingly well wrought, and she excels at atmosphere: you see, feel, and smell every scene in a kind of 3-D. Reading one of her books is immersive, it’s time travel, it’s magic.

Harris’s understanding of the Regency era is remarkable for its depth and range, and she is one of the few authors whose series I’ve stuck with over time because she isn’t disappointing.

Her glamorous, debonair nobleman is Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. He is gifted with “hearing and night vision” that are “unusually acute” and they help him investigate murders–and sometimes outwit stalkers. He’s also a master of disguise, but he’s no Marvel superhero. In fact, Devlin starts off the 18th book of the series with a profound and troubling disadvantage: a painful leg injury that’s likely to keep this ex-soldier from crossing the Channel to Belgium where “the armies of Europe were massing for what would in all likelihood be one of the most decisive battles in history.” 

He badly wants to join former comrades, but that isn’t on the cards, despite the looming menace abroad. Napoleon has escaped Elba and been welcomed back to power in France with jubilation. The exiled emperor’s shadow has fallen again over Europe–and it has surprising power over Devlin as he becomes entangled in a twisted tale of mutilated corpses, espionage, secrets of seduction and betrayal, witchcraft and werewolves. 

Suspects abound and they could well be French assassins from any number of rival factions.  He himself is attacked and warned off in classic PI style by a huge thug and an oily villain.  As you’d expect, he acquits himself well; even with his injury, St. Cyr is not an easy mark.

One of the best aspects of this series is its social range. Between St. Cyr and his amateur journalist wife Hero, we meet people of all ranks in Regency England: actors, fortune tellers, politicians, aristocrats, thieves, men of the law, servants, governesses, thugs, inn keepers, soldiers, beggars, ferrymen, sailors, merchants, tradesman, vagabonds and many more.  We travel through a London that has disappeared like Atlantis, with Harris as our guide. 

Built with short, punchy chapters, this book has it all: mystery, scenery, adultery, luxury, poverty, cruelty, zealotry,  hypocrisy, bravery.  And the series consistently has some of the most beautiful book covers around.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed books at Salon, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and other publications.