Is the fog gone? Is sin differently defined more than a century after Jack the Ripper prowled Whitechapel? Never mind, there are corners of evil in the Big Smoke, and Paul Bryers finds them in The Used Women’s Book Club (Bloomsbury). His protagonist, a television cameraman-turned-art student, loans his house to a womanising friend, who is found there hacked to death. Unwilling to live where his friend was brutally murdered, he moves to a semi-derelict tugboat moored at Wapping Pier among rat-infested rubbish barges, squawking herring gulls and, of course, rising mists. As for the title: the victim was married to a member of the book club, so called after a dyslexic typing error which had a certain relevant ring to it. There are interesting people in this thriller, from actors working as tour guides to academics besotted with Virginia Woolf; there are more murders, and enough red herrings to satisfy the predatory Docklands gulls.
Still in London but moving back a century, Jane Jakeman’s In the Kingdom of Mists (Black Swan) deals with a series of murders in the early 1900s, when impressionist Claude Monet moved into the Savoy hotel to paint the light as it fell upon the fog and mists. He befriends a young diplomat who becomes embroiled in the investigation when he inadvertently comes upon one of the corpses. The paintings are reproduced in a glossy colour section.
London Dust by Lee Jackson (Arrow) is set in 1850 and in a less salubrious part of London. A singer known as “the Brick Lane Butterfly” is found stabbed to death; her friend, a failed actress, insinuates herself into a seedy milieu of con artists and thieves, part-time whores and small-time impresarios to find the murderer. Like the other two novels, it’s a good read and makes the most of its setting.