This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Bridie Devine is a female detective in Victorian London who aids the police in solving murders and takes in private cases. Bridie in turn is aided by her 7-foot-tall housemaid, Cora, whom she rescued from deplorable conditions in a circus.
Bridie is asked to help find the missing daughter of Sir Edmund Berwick, a 6-year-old who has been kept in hiding at the baronet’s estate and who has rather strange and unique traits. With her background and some experience in looking for children with odd birth defects, Bridie knows it’s likely little Christabel will be sold to collectors or anatomists, so she gets to work right away. A woman of science and utter practicality, Bridie finds the stories she hears about the girl as she goes about the investigation hard to believe — that the child brings memories to mind; that she can drown someone with no water around; that her bite is venomous.
In a visit to a church, Bridie gains an unexpected and unsettling companion: a transparent former boxer named Ruby Doyle, who is delighted to see Bridie, telling her he hasn’t seen her in years but that he’d recognize her flaming red hair and her “irresistible scowl” anywhere. He ends up accompanying her throughout her whole investigation.
The story winds through a distinctly atmospheric London and environs, through dirty and smelly streets to decrepit churches and old manors. The author takes her time describing her characters inside and out and bringing the whole tale to vivid life, and the reader doesn’t begrudge her one perfectly chosen adjective or colorful phrase. Things in Jars is deliciously gothic.
Bridie must draw upon all she’s experienced and been subjected to in her life as she tries to save a little girl, solve the mystery of the supposed ghost who insists she knows him, and confront a veritable demon from her youth. The story goes back and forth between Bridie’s present and her past, and every plot line is threaded in just so to create a very satisfying tapestry of a story. A really fine novel.
Rated: Moderate (this one is right on the line of moderate and high for language, but it doesn’t really feel like it fits in the high category), for six instances of strong language and occasional uses of milder language. The main character smokes a pipe with tobacco and other unique mixes of drugs created by a pharmacist friend. Sexual content is limited, with Bridie thinking about how it would be to be with a man, but no real details. Violence includes brief references to powerful men taking advantage of women who work for them; the rough treatment of the girl by her captors; poisoning; a character who really is dark and has little conscience as he does medical experimental “treatments” and exploration. There are several instances referring to the strange “Things in Jars” of the title: people collect nature’s oddities.
* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Click here to purchase your copy of Things in Jars on Amazon.
