The Infidel Stain

Starred review from January 18, 2016
Set around 1840, Carter’s outstanding second whodunit reunites Jeremiah Blake and William Avery, who tackled a baffling mystery a few years earlier in India in 2015’s The Strangler Vine. Avery, a former army captain who has returned home to England with his pregnant wife, responds to a summons from Blake, a private inquiry agent in London. Viscount Allington, a philanthropist and member of the new Tory government, wants the pair to look into two grisly murders that the police have neglected. Printers Nat Wedderburn and Matthew Blundell were butchered in their workplaces, their corpses displayed as if part of some ritual. The politician hopes that solving the crimes will serve to bolster the lower classes’ faith in the establishment and counter the growing appeal of the Chartists, who demand that all Englishmen have the right to vote. Carter excels at incorporating the volatile politics of the time into her cleverly constructed plot, which repeatedly confounds readers’ expectations while presenting moving scenes of the plight of London’s poor reminiscent of Dickens. Author tour. Agent: Bill Hamilton, A.M. Heath (U.K.).

May 30, 2016
This sequel to Carter’s The Strangler Vine (2015) finds unlikely pals—raffish inquiry agent Jeremiah Blake and gentlemanly but two-fisted Captain William Avery—back in Victorian London in 1841, three years after their sojourn in India. This time they partner up at the behest of prominent philanthropist Viscount Allington, who hires them to investigate the murders of two printers found butchered in their workplaces, where they printed pornographic and politically radical material. British actor Wyndham (best known from his role on the HBO series Rome) uses an educated, eager voice for the whodunit’s narrator, Avery, who naively expects the best from people. When he is exposed to evidence of man’s inhumanity, while following clues through the Dickensian impoverished city streets (at one point spying Dickens himself), Wyndham conveys surprise so effectively you can almost hear his jaw drop. A Putnam hardcover.