Genre: Historical, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gau
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Jack Merrit longs for a case more challenging than burglaries and missing jewels, and when someone finds a skeleton inside a pipe organ, his wish comes true. At first, the strange discovery in the church of St Clement Danes seems like a prank, but when Jack’s next call is to a crime within earshot of the bells of St Martin’s, an uneasy pattern emerges.
Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement’s
You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s
And then, the murders start.
If the first is chance, a second becomes a coincidence, but a third? That’s a pattern, and these are no ordinary murders. They involve diabolical contraptions that kill seemingly random victims. Asked by both London police forces to investigate without being told why, Jack and his men embark on an investigation knowing where the killer will strike next, but not when.
When the killer invites Jack to join his game, a contest of intellect begins, and knowing failure will lead to disgrace, he pits himself against his most cunning adversary so far.
This is the tenth book in the Delamere Files series. The books should be read in order.
The Review
Brilliant. Dark. Hair-raising. There is no central figure from Delamere House whose book this is; it’s an ensemble performance with the usual focus on Jack Merrit and Ben Baxter. But everyone plays their role, as part of not just a team, but of a family. The importance of Jack’s found family is ever-present, and it matters here because the serial killer the Delamere team is after has no concept of family except as a source of pain and isolation. I won’t say any more except to note that the entire story is driven by the fate of an unhappy child.
Jackson Marsh has decided to explore a different sort of dark underbelly in this 10th volume of the Delamere files. A crucial bit of understanding is that everyone on Jack’s team—and Jack himself—has had someone looking out for them, no matter how hard their life has been. As a result, all of our friends at Delamere care about other people. The shadowy killer in this book—whom we meet right at the start—represents the book’s title: an utter indifference to human life. His story is a very dark tragedy, and the result is a monster determined to defeat Jack and his team.
The other leitmotif of the book is a children’s nursery rhyme called “Oranges and Lemons,” of which I had never heard before, but which has a long history in the UK. It both inspires the killer and offers up clues to the Delamere team. Even more notably than in the other books in the series, the reader knows a lot more than Jack and his crew do for quite a long time. It ratchets up the anxiety, let me tell you, as we watch these men we care about so well struggle to pick apart the bloody mystery into which they’ve all been drawn. Every bit of the team’s puzzle-solving skills comes into play as a desperate clock ticks.
The twist of the end is not what I thought it might be, either. What it is, however, is a promise that there is another Delamere book to come. Jackson Marsh has created a world full of darkness and violence, but has also given us a unique group of characters bound by love.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
