Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Book six in the Inspector Lestrade series.
The London Underground Railway, in 1895, was described as 'dark, deadly and halfway to Hell'. Only too true, for as the last train rattled into Liverpool Street, the one remaining passenger did not get off. How could she, when her eyes stared sightless and her heart had stopped?
There was another corpse at the Elephant in the morning, wedged between the seats like an old suitcase. And another had missed the late-night connection at Stockwell. What was left of her lay on the floor of the 'padded cell', her shoes kicked off in the lashings of her agony as she died.
There is a maniac at large and Inspector Lestrade is detailed to work with the Railway Police, something he needs a little less than vivisection. Heedless of warnings to 'mind the gap' and 'mind the doors', the doughty detective plunges through a tangled web of vicious deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London goes in fear of her life.
Who is the legendary Blackfriars Dan? What are the secrets of the Seven Sisters? Whose body lies at Ealing? Will the London Transport System survive, or will Lestrade run out of steam?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mystery fans may recall Inspector Lestrade as a decidedly inferior policeman who appears in the Holmes canon. Trow's Lestrade is all too human but more competent than Conan Doyle's. This 11th entry in Trow's Lestrade series provides a good time and a vatful of fascinating Victorian lore. It's 1895, and the inspector (last seen in Lestrade and the Magpie) is desperate to stop a homicidal maniac who is killing women on the Underground. Since the murders appear to be random, Lestrade has difficulty constructing a trail, and his frustration mounts with each death. As if the case were not challenging enough, Lestrade must also contend with cranky bosses, green underlings (excepting the loyal Constable Walter Dew), and mysterious "relatives" of the victims who show up at the station house. Then there's the distraction of the highly appealing Trottie True, the sister of one of the victims. The possible suspects are nicely drawn, and the cameo appearances by many famous Victorians--the Marquess of Queensbury and Aubrey Beardsley among them--turn this book into a kind of parlor game. The ending yields a rather arbitrary but adequate villain. But the plot is incidental; the heart of this story lies in its clever, lively language. The brazen wordplay occasionally may elicit a groan, but much more often a smile.
