The Outcast Girls
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Private investigators Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham get more than they bargain for when they take on a case in a girls' boarding school, in the latest World's End Bureau Victorian mystery.
London, 1881. Lily Raynor, owner of the World's End Investigation Bureau, is growing increasingly worried. Work is drying up, finances are tight and she cannot find enough for her sole employee, Felix Wilbraham, to do. So when schoolteacher Georgiana Long arrives, with a worrying tale of runaway pupils, it seems like the answer to her prayers. The case is an interesting one, and what could be less perilous than a trip to a girls' boarding school, out in the Fens?
Disguised as the new Assistant Matron, Lily joins the Shardlowes School staff, while Felix - suppressing his worries about his cool, calm employer - remains behind. But there are undercurrents at Shardlowes, and the shadowy, powerful men who fund the school's less fortunate pupils loom larger as Felix's own investigations unfold. Felix can't shake off his fear that Lily is in danger - and soon, his premonitions come frighteningly true . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Early in Clare's chilling sequel to 2019's The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits, Georgiana Long, a teacher at Shardlowes, a girls' boarding school in the English fens, arrives one winter day in 1881 at the London office of Lily Raynor, the proprietor of World's End Bureau, a private enquiry agency. Three students have run away on separate occasions in recent months, and Georgiana, who doesn't trust the police, wants Lily to investigate. Intrigued, Lily agrees to fill a temporarily vacant staff position at Shardlowes in order to do so. Lily has her lone employee, Felix Wilbraham, look into the school's secretive benefactors, the Band of Angels, and he pursues a trail that leads to Scotland. Shifts between Lily's inquiries and Felix's help jack up the suspense. The two capable and self-assured leads stand in contrast to such stock secondary characters as the ambitious headmistress and the caretaker too fond of his whiskey. Descriptions of the bleak winter landscape of the fens ("the naked trees like skeletal limbs clawing up at the grey sky") lend atmosphere. Anne Perry fans will want to check this out.
