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Book Review: The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin

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The Wicked ComethAbout the Book

The year is 1831. Down the murky alleyways of London, acts of unspeakable wickedness are taking place and no one is willing to speak out on behalf of the city’s vulnerable poor as they disappear from the streets.  Out of these shadows comes Hester White, a bright young woman who is desperate to escape the slums by any means possible.  When Hester is thrust into the world of the aristocratic Brock family, she leaps at the chance to improve her station in life under the tutelage of the fiercely intelligent and mysterious Rebekah Brock. But whispers from her past slowly begin to poison her new life and both she and Rebekah are lured into the most sinister of investigations.

Hester and Rebekah find themselves crossing every boundary they’ve ever known in pursuit of truth, redemption and passion. But their trust in each other will be tested as a web of deceit begins to unspool, dragging them into the blackest heart of a city where something more depraved than either of them could ever imagine is lurking . . .

Format: ebook, hardcover(352 pp.)  Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 1st February 2018             Genre: Historical Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Wicked Cometh on Goodreads

My Review

Following a narrow escape from under the wheels of a carriage, Hester is taken under the wing of a handsome young surgeon, Calder Brock, who, in an echo of Pygmalion, sets out to prove that the poor are capable of education.  Hester finds herself drawn to Calder’s sister, Rebekah, who is charged with her tuition.  Soon Hester becomes eager for any excuse to be in Rebekah’s presence, daring to hope that her own feelings might be returned.   ‘Then something changes – the meeting of a kindred spirit, the potency of mutual trust – and the tender graces of self-belief once more visit themselves upon us and we are as complete as ever we may be.’

The author concentrates on building up the atmosphere of the period and the various locations in the first half of the book.   The writing conjures up the sights, sounds and smells of the seedier parts of London: dank cellars, dark alleyways, mire-strewn streets, secret thoroughfares used for illicit purposes.

The pace of the story really picks up in the second half as Rebekah and Hester embark on their investigation into the disappearances, risking everything as they enter the realm of individuals who have few scruples in dealing with those who get in their way.  Soon they are in parts of London without light both literally and metaphorically. ‘Dark with the business of the people who live here.  Dark with the deeds that are done.’  With the benefit of historical hindsight, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on so the interest was mainly in watching Hester and Rebekah feel their way slowly towards the shocking truth.

I enjoyed The Wicked Cometh and thought it was an assured debut.  I admired the writing and the way the author skilfully evoked the atmosphere of the dark underbelly of London.  There were also some intriguing plot elements revealed at the end.  I’ll confess I was left with the slight sense at the end that I’d read it all before in other books (admittedly a bit of an occupational hazard if, like me, you read a lot of historical fiction).  However, I would definitely look out for further books from this author.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers Hodder & Stoughton in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Atmospheric, Gothic, mystery

Try something similar…The Wages of Sin by Kaite Welsh (click here to read my review)

Laura CarlinAbout the Author

Laura Carlin left school at 16 to work in retail banking and it was only after leaving her job to write full-time that she discovered her passion for storytelling and exploring pockets of history through fiction. She lives in a book-filled house in beautiful rural Derbyshire with her family and a Siamese cat called Antigone. When she’s not writing she enjoys walking in the surrounding Peak District. The Wicked Cometh is Laura Carlin’s first novel.

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Throwback Thursday: The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m revisiting a book that I reviewed in the early days of my blog: the evocative and moving, The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak, published in January 2017.  (This was in the days when my reviews were rather shorter than they are now.  Not sure if this is good or bad…)

signalAbout the Book

In a small town in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich. They were three generations under one roof. Three generations, but only one branch of a scraggy tree; they are a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Having survived the trenches of World War I as an Austro-Hungarian conscript, Vinich journeyed to America and built a life for his family. His daughter married the Hungarian-born Bexhet Konar, who enlisted to fight with the Americans in the Second World War but brought disgrace on the family when he was imprisoned for desertion. He returned home to Pennsylvania a hollow man, only to be killed in a hunting accident on the family’s land. Finally, in 1971, Hannah’s prodigal younger son, Sam, was reported MIA in Vietnam.

And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of conviction, a proud work ethic, and a firstborn’s sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to create a new life, to embrace the land and work its soil through the seasons. The Signal Flame is a stirring novel about generations of men and women and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war.

Format: Hardcover, ebook, paperback (272 pp.)   Publisher: Scribner
Published: 24th January 2017              Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

 

Find The Signal Flame on Goodreads

My Review

Covering a period of a few months, we learn, mainly from the point of view of Bo, something of the tragic history of the family and the impact of his brother’s absence on the family and others. There is some gorgeous writing: “The air smelled of the same candle smoke and slight perfume of frankincense and gardenia that she remembered, and it still sounded even in its silence like every voice uttered was a whisper and that whisper would echo forever if she just sat and listened long enough.”

The book is incredibly sad in parts as tragedies – natural and manmade – come one after another; the toll of grief on some of the characters is sympathetically conveyed: “No, she had come to believe that the only thing one could be certain of was loss. The loss of others as one lived on. Loss as the last thing one left behind.”

What prevents the book becoming too overwhelmingly depressing is the theme of reconciliation.   There are some particularly moving and touching scenes between characters in which longstanding differences are set aside which, I’m not ashamed to say, moved me to tears.   I loved the descriptions of the routine of daily domestic tasks which never become mundane but gave a sense of the rhythm of life in a small, isolated community. The author explores ideas of duty, obligation and continuity through Bo’s sense of connection to the land acquired by and handed down by his grandfather and there is a sense of a real regard for skill and craftsmanship.

The one slight negative is that the absence of speech marks sometimes made it difficult to distinguish conversation between characters from internal monologue.  I received an advance review copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Scribner, in return for an honest review.

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In three words: Evocative, moving, haunting

Try something similar: The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey (click here to read my review)

Andrew KrivakAbout the Author

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Sojourn, a novel set during WWI; A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order; and the editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, he grew up in Pennsylvania, has lived in London, and has taught at Harvard, Boston College, and the College of the Holy Cross. Krivak currently lives with his wife and three children in Massachusetts.

Connect with Andrew

Website ǀ  Goodreads