Cushla McKinney reviews Laura Carlin's The Wicked Cometh. Published by Hachette.
British author Laura Carlin's debut is a melodramatic melange - a little bit Bronte, a dash Dickens, a wink of Waters, a piece of Poe - that captures the spirit of the Victorian Gothic without taking itself the least bit seriously.
The story opens in London during the winter of 1831, where 18-year-old Hester White, orphaned daughter of a country parson, lives"on the lowest terms life has to offer''.
Here in the filthy alleys of London her middle-class upbringing counts for nothing, and her desperation to escape is heightened by a series of missing-person cases that have the city's inhabitants on edge.
Then, just as her spirits reach their lowest ebb, she is struck down by the carriage of a young doctor who immediately identifies her as an ideal subject upon which to test his hypothesis that"even those from the gutter can be educated''.
Hester plays the role of foundling so convincingly that she is soon installed in his family's country house under the tutelage of his older sister, Rebekah.
The two women quickly develop feelings for each other rather closer than propriety and circumstance allow.
Meanwhile, two of Rebekah's former maids become members of the missing. So when Hester finally confesses her true origins, the women team up in an effort to find them, a decision that brings hidden passions into the open and leads them into dangers uncomfortably close to home.
Light, entertaining and jolly good fun.
Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
