With her powerful storytelling and immersive world-building, Bella Ellis has done it again. This third installment of the Bronte Sisters Mysteries will keep you speeding through the chapters as the suspense and drama build.
This time, the Brontes are summoned south to London by an acquaintance who has recently eloped, only to have her husband kidnapped by a band of rogues who give her one week to find and return "the jewel" they have lost.
The Bronte sisters are accompanied by their brother Branwell. I like that this series humanizes Branwell and draws out from the reader a feeling of regret for what he could have been. And the characterization of all three sisters is brilliantly done, particularly Emily in all her antisocial glory.
The suspense and pacing are excellent.

Content note: The evil that the Brontes encounter is very grim, involving dens of iniquity and child trafficking. Readers should be aware that there are a couple of brief moments that involve the supernatural, though these are not central to the plot.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for this advance review copy! ( )

Book three in Bella Ellis' Bronte Mysteries series earns another firm three stars from me, I'm afraid - I love reading about the sisters (and Branwell, tagging along as chaperone) but this was more of a Dickens pastiche (the grandfather of verbosity even makes a cameo appearance) than a true ode to Charlotte, Emily and Anne. 'I do miss the common decency of a good, honest Yorkshire mystery,' Emily opines at one point, and I quite agree.

Although the story opens in 1852, with Charlotte mourning the deaths of her siblings a few years earlier and 'burning every trace of evidence' to protect Emily's privacy (as Charlotte did indeed take on the role of family censor), the mystery takes place in July 1846, just after the sisters' first publication of poems was reviewed in The Critic.

With Branwell in self-destruct mode after being rejected by Mrs Robinson, Anne Brontë is surprised to receive a letter from the younger Lydia Robinson, now Mrs Roxby. 'Runaway Lydia? Eloped and disinherited Lydia?' as Emily summarises the scandal. The expectant Mrs R asks the sisters to come to her aid in London, and help save her husband from a Dickensian gang known as the Sharps, lead by a Fagin-esque figure named Noose, who are holding Henry Roxby hostage until he returns a stolen 'jewel' to them. They have given Lydia a week to locate and return the missing item or both she and husband will be killed. All four Brontës - Branwell hoping that rushing to the rescue of her daughter will endear him to his former mistress - immediately take the train to London and head straight for Drury Lane, where Lydia Roxby is holed up in an attic room above the theatre, very much with child and fast running out of funds, ideas and time to save her husband. Charlotte meets a beautiful young actress named Kit Thornfield - stage name Celine Varens (see what she did there?) - and Emily finds herself falling for the charms of a dark-haired young actor with a murky past called Louis, despite swearing that her heart is her own and she will remain a spinster. But even with help from the locals, the Brontës are stumped. Nobody knows exactly what they are searching for, or where to start looking. How can three women from Yorkshire save a man from the grimy underbelly of London in less than a week?

I found the first half of the novel very slow and clunky, with lots of reassurances that the Brontë sisters are brave, determined and more than a match for any man, etc - Emily brings her father's pistol and is later armed with a sword by Louis, just to prove how spunky she is - and the concluding chapters utterly ridiculous. Dickens, female novelist Catherine Crowe and another key historical figure (unmasked by those 'meddling kids') are all shoehorned into the narrative, and the original characters are worthy of Victorian 'sensation novels' but sit awkwardly with modern readers (or did with me, at least!) Irish actress Kit is dressed in men's clothing when Charlotte meets her but has a stunningly beautiful face and long red hair, and Louis walks a thin line between the surface and the shadows of London life, able to handle himself in a fight but charming enough to woo Emily. The 'Red Monarch' of the title is the arch villain of the underworld, out for power and revenge, yet somehow easily defeated by three women from the provinces. And even the sisters seemed wildly out of 'character', lampshaded by the suggestion that Emily 'felt as if she could walk in the shoes of her Gondal queens and duchesses, and cast herself in any role she chose, unchained from expectation' - or, what happens in Dickens' London stays in Dickens' London.

Whether falling asleep or rolling my eyes, I struggled to enjoy this adventure, unfortunately. The author might be planning to squeeze another mystery into two years between this story and Emily's death in 1848, but I hope she returns to home ground if she does. ( )