Spotlight on The Nightingale Affair by Tim Mason

From the publisher:

Algonquin, $28 (400p) ISBN 978-1-64375-039-2

Description

In this twisty Victorian detective thriller from the author of The Darwin Affair, Inspector Charles Field hunts a serial killer with a sinister signature targeting Florence Nightingale’s nurses in Crimea and women in London. 

Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary Beast of the Crimean, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Nightingale, a wealthy young society woman, has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey—despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own life.

Case closed. Or is it?

Twelve years later, back in London, amid the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way, he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies are discovered, and before his own family gets pulled into danger. Populated by real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli to novelist Wilkie Collins to, of course, Florence Nightingale herself, and steeped in historical details of 1860s London, The Nightingale Affair plays out against a backdrop of a rapidly changing society. Most of all, it is a pure reading delight, offering shocks, unforgettably vivid scenes, and surprising twists.

My thoughts:

Anyone who enjoys historical mysteries that reference real life people will want to give this title a look. It is the second mystery by the author following on The Darwin Affair.

This time the historical personage reference is to Florence Nightingale and the time is the mid 1880s. How will the doings in the Crimea and a serial killer from that time figure into the story? Is this beast killing again or is this a red herring? Is the crime, a murder, personal or political? It will be up to Inspector Charles Field to figure out this complex and serpentine situation. This is something that he does most competently in a story that was given a starred review by Publishers Weekly. I concur.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for this title and the blog tour invite.

Hashtags:

#TheNightingaleAffair

#TimMason