The Hourglass Factory
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
1912 and London is in turmoil…
The suffragette movement is reaching fever pitch but for broke Fleet Street tomboy Frankie George, just getting by in the cut-throat world of newspapers is hard enough. Sent to interview trapeze artist Ebony Diamond, Frankie finds herself fascinated by the tightly laced acrobat and follows her across London to a Mayfair corset shop that hides more than one dark secret.
Then Ebony Diamond mysteriously disappears in the middle of a performance, and Frankie is drawn into a world of tricks, society columnists, corset fetishists, suffragettes and circus freaks. How did Ebony vanish, who was she afraid of, and what goes on behind the doors of the mysterious Hourglass Factory?
From the newsrooms of Fleet Street to the drawing rooms of high society, the missing Ebony Diamond leads Frankie to the trail of a murderous villain with a plot more deadly than anyone could have imagined…
A Val McDermid New Blood Pick, Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
An Alex Gray New Crimes Pick, Bloody Scotland
‘Rollicking whodunit adventure…terrific’ IAN RANKIN
‘[A] corking debut…full of information about the suffragettes and great fun’ SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘Its energy, crackle and humour is infectious’ ELIZABETH BUCHAN, DAILY MAIL
‘This whodunnit teems with larger-than-life characters…Yet this is also, in part, a historical novel, with landmark events (often not seen as being contemporaneous to one another)…all breathing life into Ribchester’s London’ GUARDIAN
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ribchester's energetic debut builds a quirky mystery around the 1912 suffrage demonstrations and hunger strikes in London, which authorities met with mass arrests, later force-feeding the prisoners. Aspiring journalist Francesca "Frankie" George, who wears men's clothes and chafes at her lowly newspaper job, senses an opportunity for advancement when asked to profile trapeze artist and suffragette Ebony Diamond. Instead, she discovers two deaths that seem to be failed attacks on the acrobat shortly before Diamond suddenly disappears. Frankie's quest for answers threatens her life and leads her to Frederick Primrose, a weary detective inspector at the Scotland Yard squad tasked with controlling the suffragettes' constant disruptions. Their converging investigations wend through harrowing prisons, seedy variety shows, a suffrage leader's office, and a corset shop that is more than it seems. The novel's phantasmagoric world and complex themes, from gender and class inequity to the justifications for violent activism, are fascinating. But Ribchester fails to give her idiosyncratic characters or her story's myriad elements (the Titanic, Jack the Ripper, fetishism, poison ivy, snake charming, and the Tarot, among other things) the full development they deserve, making the book feel overcrowded and emotionally flat despite its imaginative strength.
