White Stone Day - Hardcover

Gray, John MacLachlan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312282931 ISBN 13: 9780312282936

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2005

Synopsis

"I mark this day most especially with a White Stone."
---Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll

Edmund Whitty, a London newspaper correspondent who can usually be counted upon for crisp and lurid copy, has fallen upon lean times. After his triumphant exposé of a notorious serial killer, he has inexplicably lost his knack for sensational reporting. Broke and desperate, he seizes upon a generous offer from a mysterious American to discredit a quack psychic. But how, he ends up wondering uneasily, does the psychic know so much about a scandal involving Whitty's late brother?

When the psychic is brutally murdered, Whitty finds himself accused of the crime and thrown into Milbank prison, the most bizarre institution of its kind in England. Help comes unexpectedly from "the Captain," a gangster not known for charity work. To save his own skin, Whitty must find the men responsible for the disappearance of the Captain's young niece, Eliza.

Whitty's search takes him to Oxford, where he meets the brilliant and eccentric Reverend William Boltbyn, a renowned children's author who delights in playing croquet, devising elaborate stories, and taking artistic photographs of little girls. There he uncovers a looking-glass world, the dark side of Victoriana, and the murder of innocence.

John MacLachlan Gray, who evoked "the mean streets and byways of 1852 London with a skill worthy of Dickens" (Publishers Weekly) in The Fiend in Human, spins an even more irresistible tale of dark secrets behind the facade of Victorian respectability.

About this title

About the Author

John MacLachlan Gray is a writer-composer-performer for the stage, television, film, radio, and print. He is best known for his stage musicals. Billy Bishop Goes to War was produced on Broadway by Mike Nichols in 1980, and was the most produced show in America for four years. He has received the Governor General’s Medal, the Gordon Montador Award, a Los Angeles Critic’s Circle Award, a gold at the New York Television Festival, and a silver Hugo. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

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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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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312282931
• ISBN 13: 9780312282936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304