When you start with a good English mystery set in a historical time and throw in a bit of romance, you have hope of an excellent read. Charles Finch makes good on that promise in The Last Passenger published on February 18. The setting is London in 1855 with the first and central, but not the last, murder victim left behind in a third-class car in Paddington Station. With no luggage, nothing in his pockets, and the labels all removed from his clothes, tracing to find out who the murdered man is becomes the first problem.
Charles Finch could almost be writing his own review of this book when he says, “He (Charles Lenox) had known more peculiar cases . . . but none quite so unorthodox in structure. Usually in a murder investigation, one began with a victim and traced him or her to a murderer; in this one, they had begun with an anonymous victim, and it had taken all the ingenuity he had to find out the man’s name.”
Historically interesting tidbits sprinkle through the tale like chocolate chips in cookies. There is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with its pages still uncut, talk of building some kind of underground transportation in London that will be more efficient, and infinite speculation on whether the rumors of a split will come in America over the issue of slavery. It is this last issue which feeds the plot as American slave trade comes into play with the identification of the victim as a staunch abolitionist.
The plot thickens as Lenox encounters Quakers; Josiah Hollis, who had lived in Atlanta in bondage for his first 27 years and friend of the murdered man; and members of the Parliament including Lenox’s brother. Then there is the lovely Kitty Ashbrook who just might make him attend to his mother’s wishes to give up the detective business and settle down with a good wife.
This is a good afternoon read for a historical mystery-loving Anglophile.