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by Steven Price
A literary tour de force of a detective's ceaseless hunt for an elusive criminal.
William Pinkerton is already famous, the son of the most notorious detective of all time, when he descends into the underworld of Victorian London in pursuit of a new lead on the fabled con Edward Shade. William's father died without ever finding Shade, but William is determined to drag the thief out of the shadows.
Adam Foole is a gentleman without a past, haunted by a love affair ten years gone. When he receives a letter from his lost beloved, he returns to London to find her. What he learns of her fate, and its connection to the man known as Shade, will force him to confront a grief he thought long-buried.
A fog-enshrouded hunt through sewers, opium dens, drawing rooms, and séance halls ensues, creating the most unlikely of bonds: between Pinkerton, the great detective, and Foole, the one man who may hold the key to finding Edward Shade.
Steven Price's dazzling, riveting By Gaslight moves from the diamond mines of South Africa to the battlefields of the Civil War, on a journey into a cityscape of grief, trust, and its breaking, where what we share can bind us even against our darker selves.
"Starred Review. With its intricate cat-and-mouse game, array of idiosyncratic characters, and brooding atmosphere, By Gaslight has much to please fans of both classic suspense and Victorian fiction. Yet Price's novel is entirely contemporary, and assuredly his own: a sweeping tale of hunter and hunted in which the most-dangerous pursuer is always the human heart." - Publishers Weekly
"Intense, frustrating, and magical, this fragmented, paradoxical suspense story will appeal to particular readers who love Dickens or who relish the complexities of Martin Seay's The Mirror Thief (2016) and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)." - Booklist
"Fans of steampunk and Victorian detective fiction alike will enjoy Price's continent-hopping romp in time." - Kirkus
"A dark tale of love, betrayal and murder that reaches from the slums of Victorian London to the diamond mines in South Africa, to the American Civil War and back. Superb storytelling." - Kurt Palka, author of The Piano Maker
"Uniting the literary grace and depth of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy with the intrigue and momentum of a Sherlock Holmes story, By Gaslight is completely absorbing - an epic, brilliantly written novel to rank with the world's best." - Jacqueline Baker, author of The Broken Hours
"This darkly mesmerizing tale is worthy of the great Victorian thriller writers, but Steven Price brings to his prose a sensibility and dazzling skill all his own...Haunting and deeply satisfying." - Marina Endicott, author of Close to Hugh
"A poetic, persuasive pea-souper. Think Dickens with Maigret's whiskers." - Anakana Schofield, author of Martin John
"By Gaslight is Steven Price's extraordinary historical novel, finely written, and deeply researched, about the period just following America's Civil War, the son of America's most famous detective (Allan Pinkerton), and a cast of truly gothic characters, half-mad and all dangerous." - Alan Furst, author of the "Night Soldiers" novels
This information about By Gaslight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Steven Price's first collection of poems, Anatomy of Keys (2006), won Canada's 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, was short-listed for the BC Poetry Prize, and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into That Darkness (2011), was short-listed for the 2012 BC Fiction Prize. His second collection of poems, Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), won the 2013 ReLit Award. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his family.
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