Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square
A Campbell Lawless Novel
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3.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A novice Scotland Yard detective chases his nemesis through the London underworld in this “extravagant and thoroughly enjoyable” historical mystery debut set in Victorian England (The Scotsman).
Before Sherlock Holmes, there was Campbell Lawless . . .
London, 1859. Great exhibitions. Foreign conquests. Underground trains. The era of Victorian marvels is also the time of the Great Stink. Beneath the respectable surface, a multitude of ills need flushing out. When a man is killed in a hydraulic burst, novice detective Campbell Lawless stumbles on to the trail of Berwick Skelton. This elusive activist rose from humble beginnings to cross swords with London’s illuminati, before vanishing, heartbroken, amid presages of disaster. The Worms, a gang of urchins, help Lawless investigate the ‘Skeleton Thefts’ mystifying society, revealing to him the disillusion that lurks beneath the filthy cobblestones.
Berwick’s trail leads to music hall hoofers, industrial sabotage, royal scandal—and even major figures like Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Lawless peels away veneers of secrecy to convince the powers-that-be of Berwick’s revolutionary plans. Can he track down the underworld mastermind before he wreaks vengeance on those who ride roughshod over his people?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sutton's superior plotting, characterization, and pacing make the pages fly by in this epic series kickoff that spans three years. In 1859, Campbell Lawless, who previously worked as an apprentice to his watchmaker father, joins the London police and soon finds his expertise at watch repair, rather than his newly acquired deductive skills, in demand. That could change after a water-powered crane, known as a hydraulic devil, explodes at the under-construction Euston railway station, and Lawless is asked to examine the future terminal's gigantic clock. He finds most of the timepiece's workings missing and a corpse. The mystery deepens for the novice copper when the coroner tells him that the supposed victim of the explosion has been dead for days. Meanwhile, Lawless's superior seems eager to curtail the investigation. Along the way to the ultimate reveal, Sutton brings Victorian England vividly to life, from the poor forced to eke out a living in the sewers to the era's corrupt power brokers. This review has been updated to fix a typo.
