KJ Charles, Rag and Bone

[Ulysses]

From the very first of the “Magpie Lord” books, I’ve loved this world and the characters with whom KJ Charles fills it. She is a fantastic writer, who depicts a plausible 19th-century England free of anachronisms or over-coy language.

It’s Victorian London, but it’s a London where magic happens and is regulated and controlled, like anything the British get their hands on (you know, like India). This time, however, we come back to two characters introduced in “A Queer Trade:” wannabe practitioner, Crispin Tredarloe, and low-key wastepaper seller, Ned Hall. Crispin is finding it hard to be re-tutored in the proper way to use his gifts, and is finding it hard to compete with Crispin’s desire to become a useful practitioner of authorized magic. What Ned and Crispin don’t quite grasp is that each admires the other for everything he feels is inadequate in himself. Ned, as a man of color in a white world, at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, feels Crispin couldn’t possibly care about him really. Crispin, as a failure and a near-criminal, feels that he can’t possibly live up to Ned’s solid wisdom and practical ability to manage.

It takes a string of eerie murders and a disastrous betrayal to make Crispin and Ned really see each other and understand just what it is they might be as a couple. The endlessly pregnant Esther Gold and the pint-sized-but-powerful justiciar Stephen Day are here from one of the other books—which seems to have taken place just before this book’s action commences. It is richly, yet effortlessly, described in vivid Dickensian detail; the characters are appealing and emotionally solid; the action is fast-paced and hair-raising.

These are wonderful books deserving of the biggest possible audience among those who like historical murder mysteries with a good dose of magic.

[Salsera1974]

Great review. I'm loving this series!

[PaperMoon]

Sounds good Uly.