Murder in the East End

by Jennifer Ashley

I love the Kat Holloway series. Not only is it cracking good reading, start to current installment, but it’s become one of the gifts I reach for when someone I know is experiencing bereavement and mourning. This is a very short list: the books have to be transporting and diverting to give the person a respite from the exhaustion of grief, with enough heft to be engaging, but not so much as to be nonstop bleak and lonely reading.

Yes, you should start with the first book, Death Below Stairs, or better yet the novella, A Soupçon of Poison, to fully appreciate the cast of characters and the slow growth of the relationships between them. Jumping in here is possible, but this is the fourth story in the series, and I think some of the subtleties and subtexts between the main cast would be lost.

This story contains a little more sadness than kitcheny warmth: children from a foundling hospital have gone missing, but the higher-ups don’t think they’re missing. Only a few people suspect something has gone very wrong, including Daniel McAdam, who remains another mystery to Kat, even though she’s still very drawn to him (slow burn ahoy!).

The cast of characters in this book widens to include specific figures who represent real menace to Kat, to Daniel, and to those they care about, and new characters who are enigmatic and strangely socially powerful. There’s enough of the familiar alongside good portions of new and interesting to keep me engaged. And, look, I’m terrible at keeping up with a series, so the fact that I read book four is itself extremely high praise, to say nothing of the fact that I started searching for news of book five!

The worldbuilding remains part of the charm and the agony of the story: Kat’s position is always, always precarious, as is the safety and security of those around her. Dismissed without a reference could mean destitution in short order, and so many people around them are barely surviving. Kat’s status as the cook both helps and hampers her life and her ability to investigate the latest mystery: she has only one day and a half day off, and her time off is already reserved, but because she goes to the market to buy food, she has more freedom than most of the servants in the house. Some of the women who live their lives above stairs are also painfully limited in their freedom, and the commonalities of that experience create a supportive cast to help Kat solve the latest mystery.

This series remains excellent: emotional and nuanced, with layers upon layers of resonance in how the characters care for one another. There’s food pr0n, competence pr0n, adventure, friendship, romance, a truly wonderful sense of found family, and a cracking good mystery.

– SB Sarah

A new upstairs, downstairs Victorian murder mystery in the Kat Holloway series from the  New York Times  bestselling author of  Death in Kew Gardens.

When young cook Kat Holloway learns that the children of London’s Foundling Hospital are mysteriously disappearing and one of their nurses has been murdered, she can’t turn away. She enlists the help of her charming and enigmatic confidant Daniel McAdam, who has ties to Scotland Yard, and Errol Fielding, a disreputable man from Daniel’s troubled past, to bring the killer to justice. Their investigation takes them from the grandeur of Mayfair to the slums of the East End, during which Kat learns more about Daniel and his circumstances than she ever could have imagined.

Historical: European, Mystery/Thriller