People of Abandoned Character

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When the first woman is murdered in Whitechapel, Susannah’s interest is piqued. But as she follows the reports of the ongoing hunt for the killer, her mind takes her down the darkest path imaginable. Every time Thomas stays out late, another victim is found dead. Worried and feeling unwell, Susannah consults Dr. Shivershev, a physician she knows from London Hospital.

The only downside from my point of view was that the detailed and gory descriptions of the atrocities that were committed on the murder victims were gruesome to the point where they almost seemed gratuitous. However, I am not a great one for violence (Tom and Jerry is a bit too violent for me), so the level of goriness that I can stomach may fall well short of the norm.People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield. House of Zeus, 2020. ISBN 9781838932732 (hardcover), 432p. Unfortunately, the second half of the book frequently dragged and the book lost its fast tempo. Also, the "twists" that the author included at the end of the book were unrealistic and contrived.

I didn’t know you could give a voice to those little tiny snippets of your brain that were less than perfect!? Other people thought like that? It blew my mind.”

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Susannah chafes at the dull life in Reading, and in 1885 - after both her grandparents have died - Susannah moves to London to become a nurse.

This is a short book but took me a long time to read because I found it so difficult – the voice of Veronika (in third person) really hit me in the gut and I had to keep putting it down. She is a young twenty-something from Slovenia. There’s nothing especially wrong with Veronika or her life. It’s perfectly average and adequate, but she’s underwhelmed at her present and doesn’t want what she sees in her future so she decides to save herself all that bother and commit suicide. After an overdose she wakes up in Villette, a mental hospital. She learns she only has days to live as the attempt has caused irreparable damage to her heart. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually an uplifting story as Veronika discovers a new sense of freedom and appreciation of life as she waits to die. The tension in the story builds up steadily as Susannah’s husband’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and violent and she begins to wonder if she is actually married to the Ripper himself. The signs, in fact, are blindingly obvious, and the reader becomes aware of the terrible plight that Victorian women suffered when they became bound to a violent husband. But Susannah is made of sterner stuff and makes plans. “Terrible circumstances” Not once does any character evince any sympathy for these unfortunates, not even the heroine of the story, which does depict the total acceptance the Victorians, both rich and poor, had of these terrible circumstances. These factions are shown in all their tainted glory amongst the fiction of the book and are a grim but necessary accompaniment to the story. This novel, set in 1888, is beautifully written. However, remember that title and my comment about the unreliable narrator. Susannah has a past. Can she be trusted to tell the story of People of Abandoned Character? And, don’t forget, this is a mystery with connections to the Whitechapel murders. It’s not a pretty story in any way. Well-written and original, yes. But, certainly not a pretty story. It's at this time that the Whitechapel murders begin. The first victim is a prostitute named Mary Ann Nichols, who's found dead and mutilated in London's Whitechapel district.In the morning it didn’t take long before Mrs Wiggs noticed the atmosphere betweenThomas and Susannah. Along with the main gripping plot, there are short excerpts about the real life victims and this really helps to place the novel and to remind us that this was of course a very real case. The victims get to speak and it's a loud voice they each have here which works well. I found this brought them into the main story and made it more real and believable and honoured their memory. I liked the different characters we were introduced to, though I don’t think I especially warmed to any of them. I wanted to feel more for Susannah and Aisling’s relationship but I don’t think it enriched the story that much. It sounds as if it could become fairly predictable from this point, but that is far from the case, Susannah is breathtakingly naïve but also stupidly brave and the journey she takes herself on is full of twists and turns. She is an interesting protagonist who you feel is not always reliable, but she does have a good deal of gumption and a curiosity that gets her into trouble.

Set in London 1888, Susannah, a spinster nurse with no prospects of marriage meets and eventually marries a young, attractive doctor at the hospital she works at. Much to her good fortune Another fantastic and complicated story from the Victorian era. Selina Dawes is brilliant – a medium who is imprisoned after a wealthy client she lives with by grace and favour, Mrs Brink, dies after a séance Selina holds. It all gets a bit complicated from there but it’s a tale of obsession and deceit. Selina starts to receive visits while in prison from a lady visitor – a gentle woman called Margaret Prior. You really can’t tell what Selina is up too, if she is devious or a victim herself. It’s hard to tell what her true motivation is, she is the perfect mixture between mysterious and alluring.Instead, it was slower, with a sense of dread creeping insidiously under the surface. The book takes it time looking at attitudes towards both women and queer people at the time. It doesn’t shy away from vivid descriptions of life in Whitechapel and other slums of London in the 1880s. Susannah envisions a wonderful life together until the newlyweds return to Thomas's house in Chelsea. The house is large and well-appointed, but Thomas's long-time housekeeper, Mrs. Wiggs, is cold and haughty and has no use for Susannah. Susannah doesn't consider herself pretty and isn't in the upper class, but she accepts the surgeon's professions of love. I loved this book. I loved the writing. I loved the language. The author captured 1888 London with all the grime, desperation of the lower class and the foul stinking fog. Leo is an MGB agent who has to investigate child murders in Stalin’s Soviet Union – a state where murder is conceptually impossible because under Stalin there is no such thing as crime, let alone murder. I loved learning about the era, something I knew very little about. Leo’s character seems balanced enough, but when you realise who he has worked for, what he’s done to people in the name of the Soviet Union as an MGB agent, even how he managed to meet his wife Raisa, you realise he isn’t quite the principled war hero he even believes he is in the beginning.