The Nightingale Affair
A Novel
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- S/ 44.90
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- S/ 44.90
Descripción editorial
In this twisty Victorian detective thriller from the author of The Darwin Affair, Inspector Charles Field hunts a serial killer with a sinister signature targeting Florence Nightingale’s nurses in Crimea and women in London.
Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary Beast of the Crimean, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Nightingale, a wealthy young society woman, has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey—despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own life.
Case closed. Or is it?
Twelve years later, back in London, amid the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way, he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies are discovered, and before his own family gets pulled into danger. Populated by real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli to novelist Wilkie Collins to, of course, Florence Nightingale herself, and steeped in historical details of 1860s London, The Nightingale Affair plays out against a backdrop of a rapidly changing society. Most of all, it is a pure reading delight, offering shocks, unforgettably vivid scenes, and surprising twists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Inspector Charles Field makes a welcome return in Mason's stellar second historical whodunit (following 2019's The Darwin Affair). In 1867, Field is working as a private investigator in London when his latest case reawakens a past one. Tory MP William Hythe-Cooper has hired Field to prove his wife, Susan, is having an affair with Jeremy Sims, a political rival. After Field spots Sims fleeing the flat he reserved for his and Susan's trysts, the inspector finds Susan's strangled corpse in the flat with a piece of red fabric stuffed in her mouth. This was also the trademark of a serial killer known as the Beast of the Crimea who targeted nurses working under Florence Nightingale in the 1850s; Field was dispatched to Crimea to catch him, which he thought he'd done. The new crime leads Field to wonder whether he's dealing with a copycat or the original killer. The action alternates between past and present, each switch masterfully heightening the tension. Mason's superb plotting and well-drawn lead bode well for future installments.