I received this ARC from NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer in exchange for a free and honest review.

This book is set in the 1600s during the plague and follows multiple characters. London is been haunted by a killer performing ritualistic murders. The main protagonist is Charlie Tuesday, a thief taker of dubious origin (he grew up in an orphanage and doesn't remember his parents). A young woman Annamarie seeks his assistance after her sister was murdered. This leads to an adventure, where Charlie will discover more about his origins. An engrossing read and would highly recommend.

My thanks to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

Got to 2% and hard DNF. Now, this is an eARC, so this scene may have been cleaned up/corrected before publication, so please take what follows with a grain of salt.

Slight spoilers follows, this happens in the prologue/first 2% of the book. Also, please be forewarned, it is slightly gruesome, this is a murder mystery and the far-fetchedness of how the murder was discovered is what drew me out of the book. I had requested this book due to the historical time period it was set in, not for the murder.

The time period is 1665 in England, during the Plague. Two story house, sick person at the top. Summertime and a fire going downstairs to counter the miasma of the plague. Sick person is visited by a plague doctor complete with the mask, gloves, goggles, etc. They murder the victim and it isn't discovered for hours later when their blood seeps through the floor onto the family waiting below. The family goes upstairs and see a horribly situated corpse. The scene is not described at all.

Ok, this "blood seeping through the floor onto those below was done in Tess of the d'Ubervilles, by Thomas Hardy, written in 1891. He gets a pass on this unbelievable turn of events, as they didn't know as much about biology as we do now. This book was written now, no pass given.

Corpses don't bleed. Blood is pumped by the heart, circulates it throughout the body. Once the heart stops, so does the flow of blood. So the corpse upstairs couldn't have been supplying fresh blood to seep through the floor.

But what if the victim was bled on purpose for the blood to pool on the floor and eventually seep through? First off, the scene with the corpse was never described, so the reader is left to imagine the scene on their own. (I don't disagree with this, I don't like to read scenes of death, torture, etc, but in this case, some description would have been less confusing.) and second, it was already established that the entire house was stuffy and hot as all get out. The victim was on the second floor, heat rises. The fires are going and it is the height of summer, so it is HOT in there. If a pool of blood was going to drip down onto the unsuspecting family, it would have had to have happened within minutes, not hours. Hours later, it would have not had the liquidity to seep/drip/etc.

Also, we don't know how tightly made these floors are. I would imagine that floors of 1665 would let liquids seep through a little easier than floors of today, but that's just me.

This scene completely drew me out of the book and caused me to look up negative reviews. Many of those negative reviews stated that the historical part of this book was not well researched at all, names of places were the current names (eg, Regent ANYthing wasn't called that until the Regency era, which happened over 100 years after the Plague in 1665), the distances weren't consistent with reality, etc. and I decided I didn't want to read something where the things that should have been factual were not.

Again, the scene I complained about was in the eARC, might not be in the final copy. The complaints of historical inaccuracies come from readers who read the finished copy. So those issues are still present.

Due to the time period this book is written in, if a customer came into the store asking for something set in that time period, I would suggest this book, with the warning that it may not be fully historically accurate. Not all readers are looking for that, so I am not going to prevent this book from being read by the right reader.

This book didn't work for me at all, I am sure it will work for others. 1, I wasn't going to push with this book since it didn't work for me but it may work for you and there is nothing wrong with that, stars.

OMG! An awesome read!

This is a brilliant series set in Restoration London - King Charles II has returned to England (1660), many years after the execution of his father Charles I and the reign of the Protectorate under Cromwell. After a decade under Puritan rule, Charles' court is a mix of frivolity and hedonsim, and also of political (and religious) intrigue as he made no secret of the fact he intended to hunt down and punish those responsible for the death of his father. His reign was dominated by his mistresses and his numerous progeny, the Anglo-Dutch wars, the Plague and the Great Fire. The perfect setting for a series such as this ... and what we are left with as always is ... what next?