Troubled Spirit - Recent crime fiction reviewed in the NYT

By MARILYN STASIO

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

Mystery novels by Andrew Taylor, Keigo Higashino, Mo Hayder and Liza Marklund.


Andrew Taylor has written almost every kind of genre fiction, from village mysteries to psychological thrillers. But his mandarin style and eccentric imagination seem best suited to the historical crime novel. “An Unpardonable Crime” was a cunning facsimile of a 19th-century Gothic melodrama. “Bleeding Heart Square” caught the swoony sensationalism of a 1930s women’s romance. Now THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS (Hyperion, $24.99) pitches us into dynamic but rowdy 18th-century England, when superstition still held a grip on rational minds despite the advent of the Enlightenment.

John Holdsworth, a London printer and bookseller whose wife falls prey to a medium claiming to be in touch with the spirit of their dead son, writes a book denouncing such charlatans. After his wife commits suicide and he is forced to sell his business, the embittered author of “The Anatomy of Ghosts” is in no position to turn down a commission from Lady Anne Oldershaw to travel up to Cambridge and talk some sense into her son, Frank, who believes he’s being haunted by a friend’s dead wife.

Jerusalem College, where young Frank is enrolled as a student, comes to vivid life through the meticulously detailed routines observed by the students, the retinue of tutors who teach them Latin and the lackeys who collect their “scholarly manure” and otherwise exist to serve them. Since town officials have no authority inside this walled city-within-a-city, students are free to drink, gamble, abuse their servants and partake in the organized debauchery of hellfire societies like the Holy Ghost Club, where the ritual rape of a virgin customarily follows dessert.

Frank’s haunting dates from the night the virgin he was scheduled to ravish died a mysterious death — the same night the wife of the dissolute head of the Holy Ghost Club (who is himself “something of a personage at Jerusalem”) drowned in a pond. As Taylor points out, “drowning ran like a watery thread through the whole sad affair.” But so do other themes, like the clash between reason and humbug, and the power of grief and guilt to raise the dead.

As a man ahead of his time, Holdsworth may be able to convince Frank that the ghost he sees is a figment of his “disordered fancy — born of too much laudanum, too much wine, too much unhappiness.” But what is this pale figure rising from the mist?

The full piece at the New York Times.