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Summary
Summary
Lunatics, dead girls, and dinosaurs? Up until that third one, it sounds like a 'normal' British whodunit. But when the suspect in the deaths of two young girls believes that his family was killed in the Amazon by something out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World, one has to wonder if he's really responsible for his actions. And that's where Sebastian Becker comes in.
Summary
Sebastian Becker, a former Pinkerton man, lives in England and investigates wealthy eccentrics who may be too insane to care for their own affairs. He is asked to investigate rich landowner Sir Owain, but arrives to discover two young girls have been murdered, and it is not the first time children have come to harm in this small town. Owain's sanity is in question after a disastrous adventure that killed his family and colleagues, and Becker suspects him of the killings. A smart young suffragette and the wild daughter of a horse trainer had a frightening childhood experience that may hold some of the answers Becker seeks, but only if Becker can convince them to trust him in time.
Author Notes
Stephen Gallagher is a novelist, screenwriter, and director. He is the author of fourteen novels, including Nightmare, with Angel; The Kingdom of Bones; and Red, Red Robin. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story Collection, an International Horror Guild Best Short Story award, and has been a Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee.
READER BIO
Michael Page has been recording audiobooks since 1984, has recorded over two hundred titles, and has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. As a professional actor, Michael has performed regularly since 1998 in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He is currently a professor of theater at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughters. He has a particular interest in Shakespeare and Eastern European theater and travels frequently to Hungary and Romania.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gallagher's new thriller, set in England in 1912, introduces Sebastian Becker, a resourceful, underpaid government detective charged with investigating the finances of rich eccentrics. Responding to claims that wealthy Sir Owain Lancaster lost his sanity on an ill-fated trip to the Amazon, during which his wife and child perished, Becker travels from his cramped offices in London's notorious Bethlem Hospital to the rural town of Arnmouth. There, he discovers that Lancaster may be connected to the murder of two young girls. Page's narration captures and enhances the dark and unsettling mood of the book. He employs a proper, clipped British accent for the bright, dedicated Becker, but softens his delivery when addressing the sleuth's personal problems-his job's meager pay and his frequent travels, his strained marriage, his concerns for his autistic son. The voices Page lends the supporting characters are equally on target-among them are Becker's spirited wife, a frustrated local lawman unjustly disrespected by the town, and two courageous women who were fortunate enough to escape the murderer when they were young girls. For Sir Owain, Page creates a voice that sounds older, but remains vital and confident, leaving the character's mental state-which plays a key part in Becker's unraveling of the tightly knit whodunit-ambiguous for a good portion of the novel. A Crown hardcover. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
In BEFORE THE POISON (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Peter Robinson refutes the common assumption that romantic suspense is a woman's game. His sensitive narrator, Chris Lowndes, is a true specimen of the lonesome soul who moves into an old house that has a violent history and falls in love with the resident ghost. No sobbing heroine could be more pitiable than Chris, a veteran of decades of writing scores for Hollywood movies. The death of his wife leaves him so brokenhearted that he returns to his native England and retreats to the seclusion of the Yorkshire Dales. "I had a curious sensation that the shy, half-hidden house was waiting for me, that it had been waiting for some time," Chris says when he takes possession of the 18th-century mansion he has bought long-distance, on the strength of a few photographs. But while the real estate agent assures him no one has ever seen an apparition on the property, she neglects to explain that a former resident, Grace Fox, was hanged in 1953 for poisoning her husband. Once acquainted with the lurid details of the crime - especially Grace's scandalous affair with a local youth - Chris begins to suspect she was punished for her loose morals and might even have been innocent of murder. Unlike Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the hero of Robinson's popular detective novels, Chris hasn't the resources to conduct a formal investigation. Yet he does an outstanding job of sifting truth from gossip, traveling to London, Paris and even South Africa to interview people with firsthand knowledge of the eminent Dr. Ernest Fox and his beautiful young wife. There's a point, though, when curiosity becomes obsession, and those who care about Chris start to fear for his sanity. Robinson outdoes Daphne du Maurier in creating the proper atmosphere for the imaginative fancies of a grief-stricken man. Winds wail, snows fall and floorboards creak, accompanied by the melancholy strains of the sonata Chris is composing on Grace's grand piano. But it's not all shadows on the wall and creepy sound effects. Once Chris gets his hands on Grace's journals, written when she was a battlefield nurse in World War II, the ghostly revenant whose presence he feels in the house is swept aside by the vital woman who emerges from these pages. So, in a sense, romantic suspense does turn out to be a woman's game - but one Robinson plays very well indeed. Sebastian Becker, the former Pinkerton detective first met in Stephen Gallagner's 19th-century occult thriller "The Kingdom of Bones," returns in THE BEDLAM DETECTIVE (Crown, $25) as a special investigator for a British group called the Masters of Lunacy, whose macabre brief is to determine whether gentlemen of substance are mentally fit to handle their estates. Becker's employers are "lawyers and parasites with no other interest than to get control of a man's fortune," according to Sir Owain Lancaster, who wrote a book blaming primordial beasts for annihilating every living soul on an expedition he led into the Amazon. Sir Owain has a dilemma: stand by his book and be branded a lunatic or repudiate his claim and be censured as a fraud. Becker is also in pursuit of another beast, the one who raped and murdered two little girls, and he's convinced Sir Owain is that fiend. Gallagher's detective is a man of fine character and strong principles, but he's upstaged by the monsters he pursues. Watching Becker track down a pedophile is gratifying, but it can't beat the sight of 20 overburdened boats hurtling through white-water rapids or Sir Owain, armed to the teeth and blasting away at giant serpents only he can see. The scariest person in Elizabeth Hand's thriller AVAILABLE DARK (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $23,99) is its heroine, Cassandra Neary, a post-punk photographer who flamed out after a brief career on the Lower East Side in the down-and-dirty 1970s. These days, Cass is fueled by alcohol, speed, black metal and self-loathing. But she's still a cult figure, famous for her book of photographs, "Dead Girls," and respected for her discerning eye for transgressive art - a talent that lands her a job in Helsinki, authenticating grotesque photographs inspired by Icelandic legends for a client who collects "murderabilia." Hand could never get away with this stuff if she weren't such a strong writer. Her studies of artists and musicians are something fierce, and there's a deadly beauty to her bleak rendering of the Nordic landscape. Josh Bazell is so cute when he's angry. And he's really, really angry in WILD THING (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), the insanely funny sequel to "Beat the Reaper." The protagonist of that novel, a former hit man with a medical degree and a fake name provided by the federal witness protection program (just call him Ishmael), returns here under another pseudonym, still practicing medicine while hiding out from the mob. As junior physician on a Caribbean cruise ship, Dr. Pietro Brnwa (to call him by the name that might even be his real one) has plenty of nasty things to say about the seagoing tourist industry. But his anger really kicks in when he joins an expedition to hunt a prehistoric monster in a Minnesota lake and meets a paleontologist named Violet who explains the environmental reasons we may be "eating human flesh in the streets" in less than 30 years. Once Bazell pounces on a political topic, his wrath spills over into furious footnotes, not to mention 45 pages of source notes and an appendix that read like the work of a crackpot genius. A former resident of an 18th-century mansion was hanged for poisoning her husband.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One Sebastian Becker's train had been standing in this little English rural stop for fifteen minutes or more. When he looked out through his compartment's window the view fogged and cleared, fogged and cleared, adding an illusion of movement as the locomotive's idling boiler vented its unused energies and a breeze drove the cloud vapor on down its flanks. Sebastian saw a landscape of field and hedgerow, hedgerow and West Country field, all the way out to the blue distant hills. There was a railway guard working his way down the platform toward them, stopping at each compartment to ask the same question. A glance around Sebastian's companions in first class showed strangers, all. A fat man in tweeds. Two clerical men, and a woman with a child. The child was about eight years old and wore a sailor suit, much as Sebastian's own son once had. A pint-sized sailor, on his way to the seaside. The plush fabric of the seat made the child's bare legs itch. Whenever he squirmed his mother would reach for his arm and shake him, once, in silent remonstration. She was a widow, still in the attire. The boy was pale and blue, like the cloth of his suit. It was as if he were his father's only memorial, and she exercised her grief by keeping him scrubbed down to the marble. She met Sebastian's eye. "Forgive me," he said, and once more looked out the window. How far were they now, from the sea? Fifteen, twenty miles? The sprung latch on the carriage door opened with a sound like the bolt of a rifle. The door swung out and the train guard hauled himself up to stand on the footboard. He'd bypassed the third class compartment next door. He was a man of some girth, and he was shining with perspiration. His thinning hair was the dark brown of a much younger man, but his thick mustache was mostly gray and ginger. He wore a watch chain and waistcoat and the uniform of the Great Western Railway. "Pardon me," he said breathlessly. "But is anyone here a medical man or an officer of the law?" He spoke to the company in general but when his gaze lit upon Sebastian, his manner changed. No one moved. "I thought perhaps you, sir?" the guard persisted when Sebastian made no response. Sebastian Becker could sense the eyes of everyone in the compartment upon him. "I'm sorry, but no," he said. The guard seemed to hesitate, as if about to say something else. Then he accepted the rebuff and moved to withdraw. One of the clerical men called after him. "Excuse me," he said, "but why have we stopped?" "Just a slight problem in the baggage car, sir," the train guard said. "The stationmaster and I are having a difference of opinion over what's to be done about it." The door closed with a bang. And that was that. There was some shifting and throat-clearing in the compartment, but apart from something murmured by the fat man no one spoke. Back in America, Sebastian thought, the guard's departure would have been the cue for some lively speculation and debate between strangers. But here, there followed a strained and British silence. The guard was repeating his question next door to the third class people, this time with no Pardon me. Sebastian opened his book and pretended to read, but it was of no use. Eventually he closed the book and got to his feet. "Excuse me," he said, and opened the compartment door to climb down after the guard. f Sebastian had once seen half of a man's head blown clean off, gone from the eye sockets up. It had been done from behind, with a shot from a hunting rifle at a range of inches. Two men held the victim's arms and forced him to kneel. The man with the rifle called a warning as he fired, so that his friends might turn their faces away--not to be spared the sight, but to avoid the spray. Sebastian could do nothing. He was part of a mob that had, only minutes before, been a peaceful labor meeting. To drop his disguise would have been certain suicide. Although his evidence had later helped to hang two of the men, the hour stood in his memory as one of shame. He might have intervened; he had not. The fact that he was a Pinkerton man and undercover, and that the mob would have turned on him in an instant, somehow counted for little after the event. Others agreed. Complete strangers were generous with their views on how he could and should have acted. You could of said something abt. the sky and then taken the gun off the shooter when he was looking up and turned it onto him, wrote one correspondent. That is surely what I would of done in yr place. And after his court appearance, another with differing loyalties wrote, On your word two good men will hang. The scab only got what he deserved and some day so will you. A return to England, the land of Sebastian's birth, had been Elisabeth's idea. She sold her jewelry to buy them steamer tickets. It meant a fresh start, but a step down in fortune. Sebastian Becker now lived in London, and drew his modest pay from the coffers of England's Lord Chancellor. They were not rich. But he had his one decent suit of clothes, and a certain authority. An agent of justice once again, he now served as the special investigator to the Masters of Lunacy. "I was a detective once," he said. "But a mere civil servant now." "Nevertheless, sir," the guard said, "I'll ask you for your guidance and I'll value your opinion." "On what?" "Please. This way." As they began to move, he signaled to the stationmaster. The stationmaster saw the wave and broke off an argument with a third class passenger hanging out one of the end carriage windows. The train was a cross-country set, pulled by a tank engine. A full quarter of its length was taken up by the luggage van. British holiday passengers rarely traveled light. They'd arrive at their lodgings in a caravan of trunks, suitcases, and hatboxes, more appropriate to a house move than a weeklong stay. Many would even pack food, as if a Minehead or a Weymouth were some far-off and foreign place with unreliable supplies. But this was the season's end. And a wet and disappointing season that 1912 summer had been. The train was less than half full. As they walked up the platform the guard said, "I expect you're wondering how I had you singled out, back there." "My travel warrant," Sebastian said, to the guard's disappointment. "I assume you noted the crest on it." The stationmaster caught up, and by the time they reached the luggage van they were four: Sebastian, the guard, the stationmaster, and the stationmaster's gormless-looking lad who'd appeared from nowhere. The lad wore a porter's uniform and a haircut that looked as if it had been inflicted on him in a dark alleyway. He couldn't have been more than sixteen, but he was wiry. "In here," said the stationmaster, and once they were inside the station's baggage room he closed the doors behind them and drew down the blinds. There was a wall of numbered cubbies for bags and suitcases, but most of the room was open floor space for setting out baskets and dry goods. A second set of doors opened into a lane behind the station. And there was a stink; a pungency somewhere between vinegar and turpentine, without quite being either. Sebastian knew it, and knew it far too well. It took him back to his first job in uniform, and memories of mortuary visits on hot summer evenings. "Here, sir." The station's platform cart had been dragged into the room. A leaking crate stood upon it. The side of the crate had been opened, with some of its boards prized off and then replaced loose to shield the contents from view. The three railway employees stood watching him, and none offered to explain. So he moved the loose boards and looked inside. Inside the crate was a cylindrical, glass-lidded tank, roped into place. Folded blankets had been wedged in around the sides to cushion it. Staring out at him, crammed in like so much colorless fruit in a preserving jar, was a small dead freak. Or two dead freaks that shared a head. Opinions might vary. It was as if in creation their faces had been mashed together to make one three-eyed, two-mouthed horror. Their bodies, as far as he could see, were normal. To get them into the jar they'd been arranged in a tight embrace, arms wrapped around each other as if clinging in terror to the only reassurance that either of them knew. Their limbs must have softened, to fit the space in the jar so closely. The lid had been sealed on with strips of tarred linen. The stationmaster said, "There are five more boxes like this on the train. We're supposed to hold them for collection." Sebastian looked up at him. "And?" "That is some kind of a human child, is it not?" Sebastian considered. He'd been expecting something suspicious concerning a trunk. Trunk murders, most of them involving dismemberment and left-luggage offices, were an enduring British obsession. He could recall one that had proved to be a consignment of theatrical costumes, unlaundered and reeking of glue and the sweat of performance. This was something else. He took a moment longer. Then he said, "I believe this should properly be called a specimen. Do you not recognize that rank smell?" The three looked blank. "It's formaldehyde." Two of the three did their best to look enlightened. He indicated the stain around the crate. "It's either leaked or spilled. What happened here?" With a pointed look at the lad, the guard said, "There was a mishap as the box was taken from the wagon. The box was dropped, something broke, and the smell came right after." The boy might have been looking embarrassed, but it was hard to tell. His expression barely changed. The stationmaster said, "I stopped the unloading and took a decision to open the box. Specimen or no, sir, is there no special law to cover the transport of the dead?" "You'd know that better than I would," Sebastian said. "Who's the owner of the crate?" The guard handed him the consignment papers, and he gave them a quick look-over. The boxes had been packed and shipped by a carrier in New York. The contents of the six crates were described as "curiosities" and were to be collected by one Abraham Sedgewick or his representative. Sebastian looked at the stationmaster. He said, "Do you know this Abraham Sedgewick? Is he a local man?" The stationmaster made a small and helpless gesture, but the lad chipped in and spoke for the first time. "Sedgewick's Fair is passing through on Thursday," he said. Sebastian considered for a moment. "Well," he said. "A fair. That makes a kind of sense. Does it not?" They were all looking at him and expecting more. Sebastian went on, "Created as specimens, bought to be exhibits. Destined for display in some fairground sideshow." "Specimens, exhibits," the stationmaster said. "I don't care what you call them. They're dead bodies, and I don't want them in my station." "Well," the guard said, "they can't stay on my train." They looked to Sebastian for some kind of adjudication. He realized that what they'd been seeking was neither a doctor nor a policeman, but a Solomon. Meanwhile, his train stood waiting. And there was an urgency to his mission that, though he could not advertise it, argued against delay. The fact of it was that he had no answer. Freak or not, these were human remains and there was probably some law to govern their storage and use. His employer might know. But Sir James was up in Dundee for the week, giving an address to the British Association. Excerpted from The Bedlam Detective: A Novel by Stephen Gallagher All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
