"excellent Gaslight Mystery"

As the new century brings new hope for many, there remains much of the prejudice especially towards mixed racial couples and their offspring. Perhaps the most scorned mixed couples are that of big strapping Irish females and their smaller Chinese husbands; they met on Ellis Island where both impoverished groups were alone with no opposite gender available from their race.

Midwife Sarah Brandt is in Chinatown tending to pregnant Irish expatriate Cora Lee, whose labor pains prove false. Cora's teenage half-Chinese niece Angel rushes inside the apartment to see her. She begs for Cora to help her as her father demands she marry elderly restaurateur Mr. Wong. When she obtains no help from Cora, Angel vanishes. Although Sarah searches for the missing girl, she assumes Angel is a runaway teen. However, when Angel is found dead in a nearby alley, Sarah knows the child had an Irish lover, but not who he is. She asks her friend Detective Frank Malloy to investigate.

The latest Gaslight Mystery is terrific although the whodunit comes late and enhances the deep look at early twentieth century racism in New York. The vivid story line brings home the down side of tenement living in the slums as marriages are economic necessities. The final twist will stun the audience, but it is the discerning look at life during the Gaslight era that makes Victoria Thompson's newest historical a must read for sub-genre fans.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted May 29, 2007

Summary

The ninth in the EdgarŽ Award-nominated series featuring midwife Sarah Brandt and Detective Sergeant Malloy in turn-of-the-century New York City.

Sarah Brandt has made her uneasy way to Chinatown to deliver a baby. There she meets a group of Irish women who, completely alone at Ellis Island, married Chinese men in the same predicament. But even as a new century dawns, New Yorkers still cling to their own kind, scorning children of mixed races.

When the new mother's half-Chinese, half-Irish niece goes missing, Sarah knows that alerting the police will accomplish nothing, and seeks the one person she can turn to—Detective Sergeant Malloy.

And when the missing girl is found dead in a Chinatown alley, Sarah and Malloy have ample suspects in her murder—from both sides of Canal Street.