This book is littered with North Somerset and Bristol references from the Arnos Vale Cemetery to the newsroom of the newly launched 19th century Clevedon Mercury as it is an area known well by the author who now lives in Wrington but wrote many of her 14 published books while bringing up her three sons in Nailsea.

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A superstitious seamstress, dead bodies floating in a murky dock and a Bristol beer house lead you into a dark 19th century investigation by a fictional female journalist more used to writing about knitting patterns and skincare.

But the curiosity of women’s editor Nelly Brooks nearly ended her brief career on the city newspaper while trying to single-handedly solve the Victorian whodunnit in a bid for an exclusive crime scoop.

Class and gender play a role in this dark story which tackles many of the social ills of the time including poverty and prejudice.

Like the river Avon the narrative meanders the more salubrious neighbourhoods of the city but the description of the impoverished housing conditions of the slum areas is haunting.

Not many of the characters are loveable and could have stepped off the pages of a Peaky Blinders novel as some are quite frankly murderous!

It feels like we are in scary Sherlock Holmes territory but with a curious Victorian Miss Marples on the quest for clues.

The description of the dirty hemlines of Nelly’s long skirts as she walks to work down Christmas Steps and the overcrowding in the Bedminster hovels stick with you.

There is kindness towards four-legged creatures and fellow lodgers in the boarding house but Nelly has a sad background but she isn’t the only one, while the brothel visiting newspaper trustee is a lorded turd.

It is an excellent yarn punctuated with a sense of foreboding and suffering.

Some actual North Somerset settlements are named and Nelly visits the Clevedon Mercury at Sixways where I worked for 25 years before retiring as editor.

Best-selling author Louise Douglas draws from her newsroom using meticulous research of living conditions in the mid-1800s.

Some descriptions echo the 1935 film Sir Arthur Elton and his Icelandic wife Margaret Ann Bjornson, of Clevedon Court, contributed to in 1935 called Housing Problems documenting the poor living conditions in Stepney, and the need for social housing.

But I do question whether a tip-off fee of £5 which in today’s money has a purchasing power of £16k is a little generous and it made me smile the mention of a spike.

When I entered the profession in the 1980s, we were still using manual typewriters and a fearsome ‘spike’ on which rejected stories were impaled. 

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Carol Ann Deacon

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