The Case of the Wandering Scholar
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- R$ 72,90
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- R$ 72,90
Descrição da editora
M. C. Beaton meets Miss Marple in the second book in the Laetitia Rodd Mysteries, which sees Kate Saunders's Victorian detective on the hunt for a missing Oxford academic.
In 1851, private detective Laetitia Rodd is enjoying a well-earned holiday when she gets an urgent request for her services. Mrs. Rodd's neighbor Jacob Welland is a reclusive, rich gentleman dying of consumption, and he wants Mrs. Rodd to find his brother, who has been missing for fifteen years.
Joshua Welland was a scholar at Oxford, brilliant, eccentric, and desperately poor when he disappeared from the university. Friends claim to have seen him since, in gypsy camps and wandering around the countryside. But the last sighting was ten years before-when Joshua claimed to be learning great secrets from the gypsies that would one day astound the whole world.
Mrs. Rodd travels to Oxford and begins to search for the wandering scholar. But as she investigates, Mrs. Rodd discovers something dark-and extremely dangerous-lurking in the beautiful English countryside.
For readers of James Runcie, Alexander McCall Smith, and M. C. Beaton, Laetitia Rodd and the Mystery of the Wandering Scholar is a delightful new mystery about Victorian England and an indomitable female detective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1851, Saunders's excellent sequel to 2016's The Secrets of Wishtide opens with 53-year-old Laetitia Rodd, a clergyman's widow who does inquiries to supplement her meager income, hearing a plea from Jacob Welland, a fellow Hampstead resident who's dying of consumption. Jacob wants her to find his younger brother, Joshua, from whom he became estranged after Jacob wooed and married Joshua's love some 15 years before, so he can make amends. Joshua has been living "like a wild creature, in hedges and ditches" around Oxford in the years since a breakdown ended his studies at Oxford University. To facilitate her search, Mrs. Rodd stays with clergyman Arthur Somers and his wife, Rachel, outside Oxford. Though Somers's obsessive High Church practices disturb her, she gleans useful information from parish curate Henry Barton, a friendly Oxford don. When Arthur is poisoned, Henry and Rachel, who Mrs. Rodd has guessed love each other, are arrested for the crime, and she strives to prove their innocence. Saunders's exquisite prose and patient storytelling build a convincing Victorian voice, while Mrs. Rodd's shrewd, energetic narration adds further appeal to the rich depiction of 19th-century landscapes and attitudes. Mainstream readers who appreciate Victorian fiction will be rewarded.
