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Pleasures of Men

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

Spitalfields, 1840. Catherine Sorgeiul is nineteen and lives with her uncle in a rambling house in London's East End. Sheltered and nervous, she has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. But then a murderer strikes the city, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him the Man of Crows. Catherine becomes obsessed with the grim crimes, and as she devours the news, she discovers she can channel the voices of the dead . . . and comes to believe she will eventually channel the Man of Crows himself.

The murders continue to incite panic in the city, and Catherine gradually realizes she has put herself in the centre of a deadly trap of sexual obsession, deceit and betrayal.

Elegant, mysterious and thrilling, The Pleasures of Men reveals the dark, beating heart of 19th-century London, where corruption and desperate desires lurked under a serene surface.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 18, 2012
      Biographer Williams (Becoming Queen) does something new with a familiar trope in her promising first novel, a thriller set in 1840 London. A Jack the Ripper–like serial killer, dubbed the Man of Crows, leaves his stabbed victims displayed with their hair stuffed into their mouths, their chests gouged in the shape of a star, and a penny placed on the exposed heart. The search for the murderer’s identity largely falls to Catherine Sorgeiul, an orphan living with an ostensibly kindly uncle. Still adjusting to the tumult of the big city, Catherine also struggles with her own sexuality and the hypocrisies of early Victorian society, even as the body count rises. In one distinctive touch, the author has Catherine identify so closely with the Man of Crows’ victims that she writes narratives in their names. Readers looking for more psychological sophistication than is usual in such historicals will be pleased.

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  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

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