CW/TW: domestic violence, violence against sex workers, depression, child neglect, and of course, murder, since it’s a murder mystery.
I mentioned in my review for Murder on Astor Place, book one in the Gaslight Mystery series, that I tapped out after this book. In this installment, Sarah Brandt is called to what she thinks is a birth, but turns out to be a call to help Agnes, a pregnant mother whose younger sister, Gerda, has just been found dead, beaten to death in an alley. Sarah reaches out to Frank Malloy, a New York police Sergeant who had worked with her in the previous book.
Gerda, to her sister’s shame, had become one of the “Charity Girls,” working class girls who would go to dance halls and exchange sex for trinkets, hats, jewelry, and other small luxuries. It was an area of sex work they negotiated among themselves: they weren’t prostitutes if they didn’t take cash for sex. Their reputation was extremely low, however, and the circumstances and the shame of Gerda’s death sends her sister into labor, and later, into post-partum depression.
The mystery plot and the accompanying historical detail explore the precariousness of the lives of women and children in this time period, especially those who are immigrants living in crowded tenement buildings. The Charity Girls are trying to manage their own poverty and limited means while also having nights out of dancing with young men – who can provide items they themselves could never afford.
The story also features some scenes at Coney Island, which was a strange oasis absent of social rigor and restriction: it was normal to talk to strangers to whom one hadn’t been introduced when at Coney Island. Boundaries so normal elsewhere are erased. Frank and Sarah both marvel at the freedom and the allure of such a place for young people, who can mingle with strangers, make friends, and have fun in a place that seems reserved just for them.
Sarah and Frank begin to investigate Gerda’s death when Frank realizes that this isn’t the first Charity Girl who has been found beaten to death in an alley in the immigrant neighborhood where she lived. Once they connect the cases, they realize they’re looking for one killer – and the clues lead them to Coney Island, various neighborhoods, and late night dance halls filled with young people, each location featuring a strange and very different set of social rules that Sarah and Frank have to rapidly decipher. The mystery plot was easier for me to figure out, in part because it relies on Sarah believing what someone says to her, and on her ignoring very obvious details.
I think that inconsistency in Sarah’s perception is what caused me to wake up with anxiety brain at 3am, and what led me to stop reading the series, as much as I was enjoying the world and the characters within it. Sarah ignores what I thought were very obvious signs of spousal and child abuse, and while I don’t absolutely understand why that specifically was what woke me up at 3am with anxious brain, I have to accept said brain’s limitations, so I’m stopping my progress with this series here.
To be clear, the fault is not with the book. The fault is clearly in my own ability to tolerate the peril and murder of a murder mystery, and the depiction of young children and women in deadly, tenuous situations – and that’s entirely my loss. Because of the intricacies of the historical detail, larger concepts like “Charity Girls” or dancing halls become personalized and made very intimate – and the consequences are explored in detail, too. Young women had some freedom, and were perhaps able to earn their own money, but were still operating within very limiting social rules and expectations – regardless of class. Having more money and being in a higher class made survival easier on a day-to-day basis, but the personal freedom and autonomy, as Sarah learns as she attempts to reconcile with her high-society family in part to gain access to a murder suspect, remain difficult to obtain. Women of every class in this world must negotiate the barter of their sexual favors in one way or another.
As much as I love the historical world, the attention to detail about the history of places I know, and the development of complicated characters, my brain isn’t able to handle the violent and vulnerable aspects – which is again not the fault of the book nor the genre. It’s a murder mystery. It is what it says on the tin. The Gaslight Mystery series is a historically rich one, so if slow-burn and abundant, personalized historical details are your thing, you’ll probably like this series a lot. (Tell me all about them if you read them, ok?)
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!
It’s always okay to listen to your brain and be respectful of your personal limitations. I actually commented in the last review how there are some good books I will miss out on for personal taste reasons and I’m okay with that.
I always say one of joys of adulthood is reading what you want, if you want. 😉
Yeah, there was a series I loved that I quit reading because it wasn’t healthy for me at the time. Good for you for listening to yourself.
Thanks for the trigger warning. Like you, I love historical mysteries, but I think I’m going to have to pass on this series. FWIW (not historical, but…) that’s why I had to bail on the Eve Dallas series. I just couldn’t handle the level of violence against women.
It’s always sad to have to walk away from a series you had high hopes for. I had this one on my list, but with so many less problematic historical mystery series to whet my appetite, I think I can wait until a few more come out to see where those elements go.
As I read Sarah’s duet of reviews this morning, it occurred to me that the only historical fiction that is not consistently full of violence against women (and children and minorities and members of the working class) is historical romance. I know that women have historically been the targets of violence and cultural/social/sexual repression, but it makes for some dreary, repetitive (not to mention triggering) reading when it’s the entire basis for a genre. I’m no Pollyanna and I don’t demand sunshine and rainbows in everything I read, but outside of historical romance, I can’t think of many works of historical fiction that present full-rounded female lives without focusing on violence, drudgery, and exploitation. Perhaps a possible future Req League post: historical fiction that isn’t all about the misery of women’s lives in the XXth Century.
There are 21 books. Obviously, someone is reading this series. Lol. I’m glad the Library of Congress seems to have most of them. It makes dipping a toe in easier since this seems like something I might want to check out.
@Erika: I almost tapped out after “Thankless in Death.” That book was too much for me, but I did wind up sticking with the series.
I love her books and she’s an awesome woman. I enjoy the detail of the period. Ann Perry is well known for her historical detail. I loved Cater Street Hangman and Face of a Stranger. I considered them love stories. But Anne Perry does have more graphic murders and I did not read her book revolving around a boat set up as a child brothel, I didn’t want to read the details. So I understand about not wanting to read so much about victimized women and children But they are mysteries and someone has to die in them. thats why I prefer cozy mysteries and I enjoy attending Malice Domestic every year to meet some of these authors including Victoria. I had a character in one of her books named after my mother.
I’ve had similar issues with some books, but from Sarah’s description I’m the review what would also bother me is that the supposedly intelligent heroine is, in this case, clearly not. I don’t like it when I feel the authorial hand manipulating the characters or the plot – of course, the entire book is the author’s creation, but within that world I look for consistency and authenticity. Stopped reading several series (Elizabeth George and Jacqueline Winspear, I’m looking at you) when I began to feel the author’s presence too heavily.
@Caterina I’ve loved Anne Perry’s books as well, but there is so much violence against women and children within them. I don’t particularly recall seeing any people of color– there may have been some– but I wouldn’t be surprised. I enjoyed seeing the way she laid bare all the ravages of Victorian kyriarchy. However, I can imagine that might be phenomenally triggering to some readers.
I see she also writes historical romance. I might check those out since Bookshare, another book repository for the blind, seems to have all of her books.
I am also hesitating about this one, but I am intrigued by the author. I think I’m going to try her new series instead, “City of Lies”.
Perpetrators do gaslight, ‘charm and disarm’ and after their victims, groom surrounding communities too into believing their ‘nothing to see here’ front… which is precisely why it’s satisfying for a savvy outsider to come along and smash the façade, though. Sigh.
I would not want fictional detectives to be slow to recognise signs of abuse/victimisation. That would add an extra layer of potential vicarious traumatisation for the reader.
Not saying I wouldn’t read it, provided there’s some metacognition going on, i.e. thinking about what stopped the investigator figuring it out.
I’d find that relatable. I’m pretty sure I considered childhood depression-related irritability as righteous anger when I was a child, for instance. You live and you learn – sometimes too slowly on the second count.
It has been bothering me for a while in non-fiction that all-rounders are rare in disciplines that draw on victimology. You’ve largely got people who are primarily experts on the victimisation of adults and those expert on the victimisation of children.
The experts mainly on adults are the ones in the public eye and the content they create is rather adult-centric and occasionally insensitive. (Coercive control experts, for instance, term child abuse techniques that some partner abusers use only ‘discipline’ or ‘harsh discipline’ when applied to children.) Can be a tad grating.
The experts on children and adult children with sequelae call things by their names, at least, but their work is rather niche due to gaze aversion.
Eg Look Me in the Eye (SBS) drew viewers in with the prospect of reconciliation between estranged family members (or enemies). You have to dig deeper about estrangement to find that the vast majority of applicants were rejected by the network because only the rug-sweeping family member actually wanted to reconcile, and when contacted, their rellie (sibling, mostly) had not the smallest intention of playing happy families with someone who refuses to acknowledge the past (typically, that the rejecting sibling had been abused, most often sexually, by an elder in the family, and the applicant sibling refused to acknowledge that).
It’s not quite the same thing that disturbs me, but I’m glad someone else is unnerved by failures in pattern recognition in the risk assessment area. Not that I rejoice at the bruising-sounding experience, but the side-effect of having someone chiming in with my feelings, to a certain degree, happened to be very welcome.
@Karin: It’s very odd to be in a position where I recommend a series, but can’t read it myself. I read City of Lies, and the historical details include the ordeal that suffragettes went through, so be warned. My favorite part of that book was the heroine, a con artist, recognizing how much of a long con women are subjected to.
I read of City of Lies recently and it’s a bit harrowing IMO. I had no idea what the Suffragists actually went through and the villain was very scary to me.
I read Murder on Astor Place for my mystery book club and, unlike most of my fellow readers, did not care for it. It seemed stilted if I recall correctly, and though the historical background may have been accurate, the behavior of the characters didn’t always seem consistent with the era.
I do not find depictions of abuse triggering per se, but I often find it extremely distasteful because it is tedious, manipulative, unoriginal, and repetitive as a plot device. It seems as though abuse of women and children became almost trendy in mysteries and thrillers as publishing taboos against graphic violence in mainstream fiction eroded. So, yeah, there are a number of authors I’ve broken up with over this particular type of violence.
(@Susan/DC: I’m with you on Winspear’s Maisie Sue Dobbs as a very artificial series.) I’ve also had issues with contemporaries like Martha Grimes and Patricia Cornwell. These two have little in common except that there’s a point where they seem to challenge themselves to be more horrific with each entry in their series. That’s where I quit. I’m still reading JD Robb, Charles Todd, and the occasional Anne Perry, though all feature violence against the vulnerable. I’m not sure where my line is or if it’s even consistent, but it’s something to think about. So thanks for these perceptive reviews, SB Sarah.
@PamG: I’m deeply flattered that you consider this review perceptive. Thank you for that! I agree with you that the recycling of violence in book after book is tedious and manipulative.
One thing I was thinking about after writing these reviews is how reading romance has left me with an expectation of responsibility on the part of the writer and the story. If a character is introduced, I want to know that this character is okay in the end. I expect resolution, most especially for the vulnerable – which isn’t always fair to expect outside of the romance genre, I realize. So when a side character is left in precarious circumstances, perhaps because of my surfeit of empathy, I get very anxious and concerned for them, and the lack of resolution is part of what might wake my brain up at 3am to fixate on it. So part of the “problem” is my brain and my expectations. But I also agree with you entirely that the manipulative tedium and repetition of violence and abuse is equally responsible.
Thank you for your perceptive comment!
One of my Mystery Book club friends and I bonded over our break-up with Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury series. My friend, after years as an avid reader, basically can no longer deal with what she calls “kiddie jep.” Grimes has a gift for creating truly luminous young people in her books, but when she killed off a lovely child in a particularly shocking and deliberate manner, we both noped for the duration. Have no idea which book it was, but I think we were both reading with the notion that the whole point was to save this character and felt cheated. Grimes may have been the first author I ditched for this reason.
Sometimes an author will sacrifice a character that the integrity of the story demands. I can live with that, even appreciate it, because it takes guts. But I can not deal with escalating victimization of the innocent (men, women or kids) over the course of a series or even a sequence of unrelated works by a given author. At the time of the above incident, I was reading mysteries and some science fiction almost exclusively. I consider it my great good fortune that I stumbled my way back to romance where it’s mostly safe to empathize, and that rediscovery was entirely due to SmartBitchesTrashyBooks. So thank you back.