Genre: Victorian mystery/suspense
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
A book I read for my own October reading, from my shelves, since I'm attempting to only read things from my own shelves. And wow, this was very different from what I expected! But I quite enjoyed it anyway!
It's about a girl who is raised in a shady environment in Victorian England. This place appears to be a locksmith shop, but is really employing people to steal things for them, that they pawn or otherwise sale. The lady in this house is into infant farming. Which quite curdled my blood. But yeah. And one of these babies is our girl. But the lady ends up keeping this girl to raise as her own daughter.
One day a dude that also has ties to this house comes in with a plot to scam the lady of a house he's been working at. He thinks they can get our girl to pretend to be her maid, and then they will convince the rich girl to marry him at which point they will put her in a madhouse and run off with all her money. Our girl is convinced to do it and off they go to carry forth with their plans.
But if of course things do NOT go as planned. And then the twists and turns start coming! And they just keep coming after that!
There are some disturbing scenes at the madhouse, and other... interesting.... scenes I was not expecting. But I did very much get wrapped up in the story, even if I didn't fall much for these characters. Despite being a long book, I was quite engaged and reading it at every chance I got.
I must say that this should have been a book on my reading list for Pride Month instead of Spooky Month though...
Anyway, wow. I can't say a whole lot more about it for fear of spoiling everything, so if it sounds intriguing, just go for it!
If you want to watch my review on my new booktube channel, click here for that!
