Not every book that I read will make it onto my Books & Looks Podcast and YouTube. This is not to say they don’t appeal to me, but sometimes we have full schedules, time constraints, and some authors just do not want to come on the show. But, I read books for my own enjoyment and today I wanted to spotlight two books that I read recently and enjoyed immensely.
Jeri Westerson has written numerous books and series, and her newest series of books are referred to as the Irregular Detective Mysteries. These books are set in Victorian Era London in the 1890s and feature Tim Badger and Ben Watson. The title of the series is because Tim Badger was supposedly one of Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars – a group of streetwise boys who supplied Holmes with information for his cases. But 5 years have passed since Badger was an Irregular, and Holmes has helped establish their fledgling detective agency.
Book 2 of the series is “The Mummy of Mayfair” and revolves around the death of a doctor who was wrapped as a mummy, and was then placed in an Egyptian sarcophagus, where his body was discovered during an Egyptian Mummy Unwrapping Party – a popular entertainment gathering among the upper crust of London society. Badger and Watson were there as hired security and are quickly hired to find the killer faster than Scotland Yard. And so we enter the world of Egyptomania, high society, and a mystery that keeps eluding our intrepid detectives. It is a fast-paced, well-plotted mystery that helps explain more of the backstory than the first book in the series, and makes me confident that the author has quite a few cases that will require the use of the Irregular Detection Agency.
“Flames of Anarchy” is a top-notch political thriller by Jerry Borrowman set back in 1908 and features the rise of domestic terrorism from Anarchists and Bolsheviks living in America. Borrowman uses historical incidents to show how America was rattled by seemingly random terror attacks – a bombing at a new train station, the assassination of a business executive, the attempted assassination of a US Senator, as well as a plot to assassinate someone at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Some of these are fictional, but the terror was real. Why? To disrupt the US stock markets, which in turn could lead to the downfall of Capitalism.
Borrowman introduces us to stock traders who are getting rich by making oodles of money when the market tanks. The practice is known as “short selling” and the traders make money when the markets recover. It is a risky business to put it mildly and is being used to help fund the terrorists. But the terror is so real that it leads to the development of the FBI, which could lead to a loss of privacy in return for keeping us safe. Sound familiar???
Anyway, the book is really well written, the history is spot on, and we are easily transported back to 1908, when nobody knew what was happening and how the fate of the US would turn out.
Super book from which I learned so very much – these are books I can heartily recommend.
