Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller is set in London in 1934, when Mosley and his Blackshirts were beginning to capitalise on the miseries of economic depression while idealistic young Communists pounced with glee on evidence that the old class hierarchies were cracking. Taylor’s London is a murky, monochrome place of fog and cigarettes, stewed tea and bread and margarine. Older men still shake from the trauma of the trenches; younger ones scan the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns, desperate for anything that will earn them a shilling to feed the gas meter.
The complicated story centres on a lodging house in Bleeding Heart Square, near Holborn, where a collection of Dickensian grotesques all seem to be in some sort of thrall to their landlord, the sinister and bestial Joseph Serridge. Into their shadowy world bursts the unlikely figure of Lydia Langstone, a young woman ripe for liberation, fleeing her brutal Mosleyite husband.
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