Genre: Historical, Mysyery
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
‘Love is more than just a chemical reaction.’
James Wright, the lead detective of the new Clearwater Detective Agency, faces a pair of unsolvable problems.
Life is going well for Jasper and Billy. Young, talented, and falling in love, the two can look forward to a rosy future. But Billy’s master, Colonel Ware, is slowly being poisoned, and if he dies, Billy’s family will be forced to emigrate.
It falls to James to investigate the poisoning, but there are no suspects and no motives. Worse, if he fails, a good man will die, and Jasper and Billy will never know the fullness of their love.
Enlisting the help of brilliant, but scatter-brained, Dr Markland while mentoring Jasper through the pain of his first love, James embarks on a mystery that takes him from the Greychurch morgue to Ireland, where tide and time wait for no man. It is a journey of discovery, both scientific and emotional.
‘One of a Pair’ is a mild-heat, romantic mystery with some comedy, and the eighth book in the ongoing Clearwater Mystery series. It is a follow up to ‘Home From Nowhere.’ You’ll get most enjoyment by starting with book one, ‘Deviant Desire’ and following the famed adventures of Lord Clearwater and his crew of loyal friends as they negotiate the villains and homophobia of Victorian London.
The Review
In this eighth book of the Clearwater series, we see the author having fun developing the idea of the detective agency – and giving us a second go at the budding relationship from the previous book between assistant housekeeper Jasper Blackwood and his music-loving new friend, Billy Barnett. Lord Clearwater and most of the household are conveniently out of the way, reducing the cast of characters to Jimmy Wright, butler Thomas Payne, and Jasper.
What seems to be a case of young heartbreak quickly evolves into a confusing search for a possible attempted murder. The Clearwater Agency’s second official case is really a personal quest on the part of Jimmy Wright (once a footman and valet, now the manager of the new agency) to save his new friend Jasper from a lifetime of regret and sadness. It is a puzzling case – in the best Conan Doyle manner – that draws on Jimmy’s own sharp mind as well as the rather confused brilliance of Phillip Markland, the doctor for Lord Clearwater’s Cheap Street Mission.
This is the moment when Marsh really digs into the sort of historical research that adds both authenticity and keen historical intelligence to his stories. The most implausible idea in the whole book is that Jimmy Wright is acting on behalf of two young gay men – something unimaginable in actual Victorian England. While this firmly anchors the plot in the contemporary world, Marsh’s rich prose and vivid world-building give it a striking sense of realism and madcap plausibility.
Jackson Marsh’s historical fiction presents us with a world that didn’t exist, and yet which – we want to believe – could have. It is that yearning for what could have been that makes these books so emotionally potent.
5 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.
