I am delighted to share my review for Season of Darkness by Cora Harrison, this is the first book in The Gaslight Series, as it has taken me a while to get to and read this book the second has also been published.

Let me show you what it is all about…

Introducing Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as an unusual detective duo in the first of a brand-new Victorian mystery series.

When Inspector Field shows his friend Charles Dickens the body of a young woman dragged from the River Thames, he cannot have foreseen that the famous author would immediately recognize the victim as Isabella Gordon, a housemaid he had tried to help through his charity. Nor that Dickens and his fellow writer Wilkie Collins would determine to find out who killed her. 

Who was Isabella blackmailing, and why? Led on by fragments of a journal discovered by Isabella’s friend Sesina, the two men track the murdered girl’s journeys from Greenwich to Snow Hill, from Smithfield Market to St Bartholomews, and put their wits to work on uncovering her past.

I liked how the author used two Classic authors as for this story. The combination of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as sleuths for this murder mystery worked well for me. There was a good atmospheric air to the story that gave a good vibe as I read.

Using these figures as sleuths gave me a feeling of a Holmes and Watson style mystery read. Dickens came across as aloof and reminded very much of Holmes, while Collins was more approachable and tries to work things on his own at times and is similar to Watson.

The murder of a maid has links to a Girls School that Dickens is heavily involved in as she was one of his pupils. Collins is a friend of Dickens and together they try to piece together the various clues that they find. They also have the assistance of another maid and together the three of them work their way through the mystery as to why the girl was killed and by whom.

This is a good story that I found quite addictive, it has some good twists and yes I did work some of them out but it didn’t take away from the enjoyment of reading. It is a book I think readers of the whodunit style of mysteries would like and it is one I would recommend. This is the first book in The Gaslight Series and I am looking forward to reading the next one.