epub ☆ The Widow's Secret ï Brian Thompson
Bella Wallis discovers her plots in the alley ways drawing rooms and dirty laundry of Victorian London Under the pen name Henry Ellis Margam she takes revenge upon the scoundrels that litter London Society by destroying them in print So when The Widow's PDFEPUB Bella Wallis is the title character in Brian Thompson's The Widow's Secret; in 1870s London she is able to make her independent way in the world by dint of her alter ego Henry Ellis Margam and the sensational novels that he publishes in which the author skewers members of society whose bad behaviour has brought about Bella's opprobrium If she cannot bring them to justice outright she can at least shame them among their peers many of whom read Margam's novels and most of whom can pinpoint the real individuals whose characters are being so pointedly shown up When a young prostitute is brutally murdered Bella gathers her friends Captain uigley a dubious character Murch most mysterious and Urmiston a former middle class official of the railroad fallen on hard times and together they resolve to reveal the brute behind the savage attack But that person has resources than they know and soon the friends find themselves fighting for their very lives This is the first in a series the second of which I actually read before finding this one; I like the characters and the plotting but most of all I like the very gritty Victorian England that Thompson portrays Bella and her friends are not the sexually stultified creatures we expect from that historical period and the poor of the city are shown neither as villains nor victims only as human beings struggling in a very dystopian reality I hope there are novels to come in this series and would recommend it to anybody who likes the genre of historical mystery and who doesn't mind some grime in their reading
doc The Widow's Secret
The Widow's SecretAbits far murkier than Bella could ever have imagined With cruelty and violence threatening to engulf her she plots one last attempt to expose and denounce the murderer Bella Wallis widow and writer must put pen to paper before her nemesis silences her for ever I picked up this book with high hopes It seemed to have a lot of potential But I feel like it never really found its stride There were a lot of conversations where it seemed like the author wanted us to guess at what was really being said as if there was a history between the characters that we were expected to figure out on our own The main character in particular seemed to be out of control randomly kissing another character in one instance and then screaming in a fury at that person in the next There was never really a mystery except that it took them 20 pages to figure out who the cigar case belonged to and they never proved the guy was the murderer It was simply implied because he was an eil person so of course he must have done it A couple of the secondary characters were fairly well written but I so disliked the main character that ultimately it really didn't matter A book this length would normally take me an evening or two to finish but this dragged on for than a week I simply didn't care enough about the story to delve into it that deeply
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