The Wicked Cometh

Laura Carlin

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, March 17th 2018

British author Laura Carlin’s debut is a melodramatic melange – a little bit Brontë, a dash Dickens, a wink 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 with her Papa’s former gardener and his wife “on the lowest terms life has to offer”. Here in the filthy alleys of London’s poorest quarters her middle-class upbringing and education count for nothing, and her desperation to escape is heightened by a series of missing person cases that have left the city’s inhabitants on edge.

Then, just as her spirits reach their lowest ebb, she is struck down and seriously injured 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’. Although perfectly able to read and write English, Latin and Greek, Hester is as eager to drag herself out of the slums as he is to assist her, and plays the role of foundling so convincingly that within days she is installed in family’s country house under the tutelage of his older sister, Rebekah. Greatly struck by her new mistress’s beauty and charm, Hester works diligently to win her esteem, and the two women quickly develop feelings for each other rather closer than that propriety and circumstance allow.

This domestic drama plays out against the backdrop of the disappearance of men, women and children from London’s streets, a roll call of the missing which includes two of Rebekah’s former maids. When her ‘pupil’ finally confesses her true origins, the women team up in an effort to find them, a decision that brings their hidden passions into the open and leads them into dangers that prove uncomfortably close to home.

High literature this is not, nor does it pretend to be. Every aspect of the book, from its opulent gold-tooled, purple velvet cover to the breathless voice of her teenage heroine, unapologetically signal it as B-grade entertainment of the most rollicking sort. Light, entertaining, and jolly good fun, The Wicked Cometh is the perfect beachside read, although the sand might prove difficult to dislodge from the binding.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/rollicking-good-read