A Fatal Likeness

Starred review from June 17, 2013
Shepherd shines again in this superb Victorian thriller, a follow-up to 2012’s The Solitary House. A note from Sir Percy Shelley, son of the late Romantic poet, causes elderly Charles Maddox to have a fit of apoplexy. In the circumstances, Maddox’s great-nephew and namesake, who’s a private detective, responds to Sir Percy instead. The Shelley family hires the younger Maddox to prevent the poet’s former lover, Claire Clairmont, from tarnishing his posthumous reputation. When Charles discovers that his great-uncle worked for the family more than 30 years before, on tasks now excised from his relative’s meticulous case files, his quest takes on a personal urgency. Juxtaposing omniscient narration with discovered “documents,” the story moves between 1850 London and the tortured ménage that created Frankenstein in 1818 Italy. The novel works equally as a family story, a blend of horror and mystery, and as a plausible hypothesis about why so many women and children associated with Shelley died mysterious deaths. Agent: Ben Mason, Fox Mason.

Starred review from June 1, 2013
A detective in Victorian England takes a case involving several renowned and infamous literary figures. Charles Maddox has taken over the detective agency once run by his famous great-uncle, who now suffers from age-related mental illnesses. Charles is hired by the son of the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to find and acquire some family papers they believe to be in the possession of Claire Clairmont, stepsister to Mary Godwin Shelley. To his surprise, Charles discovers that his great-uncle had once worked for the Shelley family, though the usual meticulous notes he took are nowhere to be found. Charles finds a way to get into Claire's house, but when she catches him reading her papers, she tells a totally different story than the one he had from Percy, his wife and Mary Shelley. Like his great-uncle before him, Charles becomes ensnared in the family's horrifying story. But finding the truth proves to be elusive. Did Shelley cause the death of his first wife and some of his children, or was it Mary? Both she and Claire, who was also mistress to Lord Byron, were madly in love with the poet, and it seems that Mary would do almost anything to keep him by her side. When Charles does find his uncle's papers, they provide answers and raise even more questions about the tragic history of the haunted poet. Lynn (The Solitary House, 2012, etc.) takes the familiar story of the Shelley family and fills in the holes in the historical record by turning it into a clever, imaginative and literate mystery.

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July 1, 2013
Shepherd specializes in historical mysteries, starting with Murder at Mansfield Park (2010). Her latest continues the career of Charles Maddox, first seen in Shepherd's take on Bleak House, called The Solitary House (2012). Maddox is a mid-nineteenth-century private detective, formerly an officer with London's Metropolitan Police but fired for insubordination. Now he scratches out a living solving mysteries for clients; he used to be aided by his uncle, a legendary thief-taker, but a stroke has rendered him only intermittingly brilliant. Maddox's brooding character and Shepherd's own voice, which uses the present tense in a way that makes it seem as if we are spying on Maddox's movements, are both enthralling. This mystery centers on papers relating to what happened between Byron, Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin during the summer of 1816 in Switzerland (besides the contest that led to the writing of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Shelley's son wants the papers recovered; we soon learn he's playing a double game. The plot's revelations sometimes seem as if only a Shelley scholar can understand them, but, overall, this is a solid atmospheric read, sure to be of interest to English majors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)