Overview

London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O'Donnell's Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances? On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter's sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters--despite her employer's preference that she stick to a women's society column. As Inspector Cutter peels back the mystery layer by layer, he leads them all, at last, to the secrets that lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands. By turns smart, surprising, and impossible to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.

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9781951142247

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Reviews

Clever and funny, and exquisitely disturbing, it is an utter joy.--Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Dickens is whirling enviously in his grave. . . . Read by a fire on a cold winter evening. Has everything you could want in a novel. Like the love child of Dickens and Conan Doyle, but funnier than both.--Liz Nugent, author of Our Little Cruelties Part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle. Tremendously good. The House on Vesper Sands is a Victorian supernatural tale that dresses its ingenious plot in richly immersive historical detail and handles it all with such a mischievous lightness, it's like eating haunted candy. Diabolical and delicious, this is the most enjoyable mystery I've read in years.--Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens The House on Vesper Sands is a delicious book. Somehow it manages to do a hundred marvelous things at once: Funny, eerie, tender, haunting and unsettling, smokily atmospheric and fantastically enjoyable, it's a nineteenth-century supernatural procedural mystery that is also an impassioned meditation on love and duty, loss, suffering, power and injustice. I absolutely loved it.--Helen MacDonald, author of Vesper Flights

An intriguing, unexpected gothic mashup with elements of Dorothy Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Josephine Tey. Clever and funny, and exquisitely disturbing, it is an utter joy.--Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep Dickens is whirling enviously in his grave. . . . Read by a fire on a cold winter evening. Has everything you could want in a novel. Like the love child of Dickens and Conan Doyle, but funnier than both.--Liz Nugent, author of Our Little Cruelties Part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle. Tremendously good. The House on Vesper Sands is a Victorian supernatural tale that dresses its ingenious plot in richly immersive historical detail and handles it all with such a mischievous lightness, it's like eating haunted candy. Diabolical and delicious, this is the most enjoyable mystery I've read in years.--Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens The House on Vesper Sands is a delicious book. Somehow it manages to do a hundred marvelous things at once: Funny, eerie, tender, haunting and unsettling, smokily atmospheric and fantastically enjoyable, it's a nineteenth-century supernatural procedural mystery that is also an impassioned meditation on love and duty, loss, suffering, power and injustice. I absolutely loved it.--Helen MacDonald, author of Vesper Flights

Author Information

Paraic O'Donnell's essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Spectator, The Irish Times and elsewhere. His first novel, The Maker of Swans, was named the Amazon Rising Stars Debut and was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards.

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