White Stone Day - Hardcover

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This Victorian thriller takes readers not only upstairs and downstairs but also into London's creepiest alleyways, pubs, and gaming clubs (the scene of horrifying rat fights). Gray weaves several plot elements together: Vicar Boltbyn (based on Lewis Carroll) delights in taking photos of the lovely young sisters Emma and Lydia, but he is not the only one interested in the girls; the Duke of Danbury, a photographer of a more dangerous and lascivious sort, also finds Emma a comely subject. Edmund Whitty, a Fleet Street journalist, finds himself caught up in a web of murder, spiritualism, and the slave trade. He spends much of the book getting some part of his body bashed, especially after learning that his brother might have been involved with a secret ring. The plot twists, as curving as a London street, aren't always easy to follow, but Gray teases a brilliant portrait of nineteenth-century British life from the story's many strands. He also manages to take familiar, even stock characters and paint them fresh and frighteningly new. Put this in the hands of those who liked Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Ilene Cooper
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In Gray's gripping second novel to feature Edmund Whitty (after 2003's The Fiend in Human), the Victorian journalist agrees to go undercover to expose a phony psychic. At a séance in a dilapidated London town house, Whitty is contacted by the spirit of his brother, David, a highly successful Oxford scholar and athlete who drowned mysteriously during a crew race years earlier. Meanwhile, at Crouch Manor in Oxfordshire, the Rev. William L. Boltbyn (inspired by Lewis Carroll) enjoys photographing young girls and then placing small white stones in his diary to mark particularly good days. Boltbyn's current subjects are Emma and Lydia Lambert, daughters of a cold and distant fellow cleric who's oblivious to the dangers they face. These intrigues eventually intersect when Whitty receives a compromising photograph of his late brother with a young girl resembling Emma. Punctuated by graphic newspaper reports, clever poems and puzzles, this thriller builds to a tense and riveting climax. (Dec.)
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