A Tale of Two Murders by Heather Redmond

She also does a good job of introducing the sorts of eccentric men and women of both high and low stations that Dickens will subsequently characterize. Muddy riverbanks, public houses, the stage of a local theatre, highbrow salons, and gilded houses, all shrouded in fog and icy weather. Redmond does a good job of replicating the sorts of places Dickens might have gone, places that will reappear in the novels he has not yet begun to write in 1835. Kate, who can’t resist the ensuing intrigue, becomes his sidekick and his sounding board.

At work the next day, when Dickens learns of Marie Rueff’s parallel demise the preceding year, he decides to investigate. Kate, Kate’s father (also Dickens’ employer), and Dickens rushed next door to be of help, so they were in attendance when Christiana Lugoson died. Dickens was sharing an Epiphany repast with Kate’s family when they heard the dying girl’s loud and painful death throes. The second victim was a neighbor of the Hogarths. Each aged seventeen, each in good health, each succumbing painfully to what might be a case of poisoning. Two young women have been murdered exactly a year apart and in strikingly similar circumstances. It is great sport to follow Redmond’s reconstruction of their embryonic relationship as the two neophytes work together to solve A Tale of Two Murders. Aiding and abetting Dickens, who in 1835 was a newly-hired reporter just learning his journalistic trade, is the flirtatious Kate Hogarth, the young woman that the reader knows will marry Dickens a year later. Heather Redmond has begun writing a new detective series featuring a youthful Charles Dickens pursuing multiple murderous clues and figuring out whodunnit.

A Tale of Two Murders by Heather Redmond