Mr. Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of crimes . . . The ghastly double murder of a society doctor's beautiful wife and her maid reunites celebrated novelist Charles Dickens, his protegé Wilkie Collins, and the formidable Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives in another brilliant quest for justice. They manage to defend old friend and ex-burglar Tally Ho Thompson, who's arrested at the scene-but then the case takes the men from the pestilential cells of Newgate to the city's steamiest dives. Gamblers, thieves, swells, whores, and Collins's fiery lover, Irish Meg, will all join in chasing a killer who is the stuff of nightmares . . .

Charles Dickens is smitten with Ellen Ternan, a teenage actress, and heads to the country to retrieve her from the home for fallen women run by Angela Burdett-Coutts-who also owns one of England's largest banks and has recently received an anonymous threatening note. Back in London, Dickens and his fellow writer Wilkie Collins give the note to Inspector Field. But more urgent worries are to come. Both men's paramours-the actress as well as a former prostitute-have been attending Women's Emancipation Society meetings. When a young feminist is found fatally strangled at the scene of a robbery at Coutts Bank, Ellen, whose scarf was the murder weapon, is arrested. And it is up to Dickens to clear her name-hopefully without sullying his own, since at the time of the killing, the two were together in a hotel room . . .

An Oxford don's death in an opium den is investigated by the literary detective duo-with some help from fellow author Charles Dodgson . . . One dank November night, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are called to a part of London notorious for its opium dens-where an Oxford history don has been found murdered. Eager to escape the drudgery of a London winter, the two amateur detectives willingly accept Inspector Field's orders to travel on the new railway line to Oxford, where Collins was once a student, to conduct an undercover investigation. Once in Oxford, they enlist the help of Collins's old schoolmate, Charles Dodgson (who will soon be known to the world as Lewis Carroll), a brilliant mind on the verge of becoming the youngest don in Oxford's history. Together, they encounter a complex conspiracy punctuated by murder, political radicalism, and revenge . . .