reviews

Edgar-finalist Thompson's eye-opening ninth Gaslight mystery (after 2006's Murder in Little Italy) examines the culture clash in early 20th-century New York City between Chinese and Irish immigrants, whose poverty prompted many of them to intermarry. While midwife Sarah Brandt is attending pregnant Cora Lee, a strapping Irish girl whose husband is a successful Chinese merchant, Cora's teenage half-Chinese niece, Angel, bursts into Cora's Chinatown flat and asks Cora to save her from an arranged marriage to Mr. Wong, an elderly Chinese restaurant owner. When Angel later disappears, Sarah investigates and learns the missing girl had a secret lover, a young Irishman. After Angel winds up dead in an alley, Sarah turns to her detective friend, Frank Malloy, for help. The action of this thought-provoking novel with its vivid portrait of the miseries of tenement life builds to an unexpected climax.

This is a wonderful addition to the Gaslight series, one of the best historical mystery series currently being published. It takes place in Chinatown in the early 1900s, where tensions are high between the Irish and the Chinese. Sarah is a great lead, and she's surrounded by strong secondary characters. Thompson fills her novel with intriguing historical information, first-rate plotting and a surprise ending.

In early 1900s New York, midwife Sarah Brandt attends to an Irish woman giving birth in Chinatown -- where many Irish women have married Chinese men. Sarah soon learns that her patient's mixed-race niece has run away to avoid an arranged marriage. The young girl is found, but she's now married to a poor Irish boy. Her family is upset by her defiance, but their anger turns to grief when the young woman is murdered. Sarah and Sergeant Frank Malloy now have the complicated task of finding a killer who is determined to keep this crime a secret.

- Sandra Martin, Romantic Times

As the new century brings new hope for many, there remains much of the prejudice especially towards mixed racial couples and their offspring. Perhaps the most scorned mixed couples are that of big strapping Irish females and their smaller Chinese husbands; they met on Ellis Island where both impoverished groups were alone with no opposite gender available from their race.

Midwife Sarah Brandt is in Chinatown tending to pregnant Irish expatriate Cora Lee, whose labor pains prove false. Cora's teenage half-Chinese niece Angel rushes inside the apartment to see her. She begs for Cora to help her as her father demands she marry elderly restaurateur Mr. Wong. When she obtains no help from Cora, Angel vanishes. Although Sarah searches for the missing girl, she assumes Angel is a runaway teen. However, when Angel is found dead in a nearby alley, Sarah knows the child had an Irish lover, but not who he is. She asks her friend Detective Frank Malloy to investigate.

The latest Gaslight Mystery is terrific although the whodunit comes late and enhances the deep look at early twentieth century racism in New York. The vivid story line brings home the down side of tenement living in the slums as marriages are economic necessities. The final twist will stun the audience, but it is the discerning look at life during the Gaslight era that makes Victoria Thompson's newest historical a must read for sub-genre fans. – Harriett Klausner