Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Step back nearly 150 years to 19th-century London, a city of horse-drawn carriages, men with top hats and women with crinoline cages, and the largest population in the world.  Scotland Yard was 50 years old and not held in high esteem, and children as young as ten were put “in service” to wealthy households; a compulsory education law for children ages five to ten was not enacted until 1880, a year after An Artful Dodge takes place.

Kit Jimeson and her younger sister Sarah are all that remain of their nuclear family.  Their father left years earlier, and their mother died shortly afterward.  Sarah, now fourteen, is a scullery maid to a wealthy family while Kit, seven years older, works part time as a seamstress, or needlewoman, as it was called then, but her main job is that of a thief.

The group of women that Kit works with is called a ring, and it’s headed by Amelia Lyle.  The women are adept at stealing necklaces, earrings, rings, cuff links, and other pieces of jewelry from London’s wealthy women and men and concealing them in their voluminous clothing.  They work in pairs, distracting their victims and quickly changing their appearance after the theft has taken place by turning their cloaks inside out or carrying spectacles or paste-on moles to change their appearance.

Amelia is respected and admired by Kit and the other women in the group, and they are stunned when she announces that she’s retiring and giving the leadership to Maggie Wirth O’Connell, the daughter of the former head of the ring.  Maggie had been transported to a penal colony in Australia to serve a twenty-year sentence but was released early and now has returned to London to take “her birthright,” as Amelia explains to Kit.

There’s something about Maggie that sets off emotions that are negative and creates tensions among the women that weren’t there before she arrived.  That’s definitely something for Kit to worry about, and it’s not the only thing that’s preoccupying her.

Sarah has told her that a night earlier she saw several Castle men (members of a local gang from the Elephant and Castle pub) on the street, and although it was a dark night she’s worried that they might have seen her as well.  And there had been a robbery and a double murder in the area.  Could that be, Kit wonders, what is making her sister so nervous?

An Artful Dodge is a fascinating look into Victorian London.  In fact, there was an all-female gang of thieves operating at that time, specializing in shoplifting from high-end stores, and not shunning a bit of violence when they felt it was necessary.  Mary Carr was the leader of The Forty Elephants, a group of female thieves who operated in the area around the aforementioned pub for more than fifty years.

Karen Odden’s mystery is spellbinding.  Her characters, including Kit, Sarah, Maggie, and Kit’s love interest James, are wonderfully depicted, and there is no doubt that readers will be drawn into a world so different and yet so similar to our own.

You can read more about the author at this website.

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