Under a veiled moon

The real-life 1878 collision on the Thames of the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer, with the much larger and heavier Bywell Castle, a cargo ship, propels Odden's exceptional sequel to 2021's Down a Dark River. More than 500 people died in the crash, mostly passengers on the steamer. The Commissioner of Wrecks takes charge of raising the sunken Princess Alice and determining the cause of the accident. Meanwhile, the head of the Wapping River Police asks Michael Corravan, who has overcome a troubled past to rise to the rank of acting superintendent, to ascertain whether the disaster was deliberately caused, possibly by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a group that recently dynamited a rail line. Corravan's conclusions could affect nascent discussions of granting Ireland home rule. Born in Ireland and adopted by an Irish family, Corravan has a personal stake in the inquiry's outcome. Odden never strikes a false note, and she combines a sympathetic lead with a twisty plot grounded in the British politics of the day and peopled with fully fleshed-out characters. Fans of Lyndsay Faye's Gods of Gotham trilogy will be enthralled. Agent: Josh Getzler, HG Literary. (Oct.)

Inspector Mickey Corravan, now promoted to acting superintendent of the Wapping River Police, investigates a real-life 1878 disaster whose tentacles reach throughout his homeland and into his own adoptive family. Mickey's daily concerns are abruptly put on hold by the collision on the River Thames of Princess Alice, a wooden pleasure steamer, and Bywell Castle, an iron-built collier, that ends with Alice's sinking and the deaths of hundreds of passengers and crew members. Suspicion quickly falls on John Conway, the Irish helmsman who replaced William Schmidt, Capt. Thomas Harrison's usual pilot aboard Bywell Castle, at the last moment when Schmidt was murdered. Members of Alice's crew are all too ready to blame Conway for the accident, and rumors mounting in intensity link Conway to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are also charged with causing a disastrous recent rail accident outside the Sittingbourne station. Mickey, who's Irish himself, is eager to find other suspects and even more eager to keep Colin Doyle, his foster mother's youngest son, out of the trouble he seems determined to cultivate through his dealings with James McCabe, powerful leader of the Cobbwaller gang, and his unsavory lieutenant, Seamus O'Hagan. The cost will be high, but eventually Mickey will uncover a plot whose instigators Odden has shielded from suspicion by the simple expedient of omitting them from the "Select Character List" that introduces the tale. The appended "Reading Group Questions," by contrast, are uncommonly provocative. A densely imagined anatomy of Victorian skulduggery with a heaping side of Irish troubles. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.