The Pierced Heart

August 11, 2014
Bram Stoker’s Dracula provides the template for Shepherd’s overly derivative third historical featuring private detective Charles Maddox (after 2013’s A Treacherous Likeness). In 1851, Maddox travels from England to Austria on behalf of the Bodleian Library’s curators to verify the bona fides of Baron Von Reisenberg, who has offered to make a substantial donation to the library. En route to the baron’s remote country home, a farmer makes the sign of the cross upon seeing Maddox, who then has visions of “black-pelted wolves” closing in on him. The nobleman turns out to resemble Stoker’s vampire count, and Maddox essentially reprises Jonathan Harker’s experiences before returning to London, where someone—or something—is killing women, draining them of their blood and leaving them with bite marks on the neck. First-rate prose makes up in part for an omniscient narrator who too often states the obvious (e.g., fried fish and sausages are the “Victorian equivalent of fast food”). Agent: Ben Mason, Fox Mason.

Starred review from October 1, 2014
Literary sleuth Charles Maddox takes on Dracula. Charles has been hired by Oxford's Bodleian Library to vet the Baron Von Reisenberg, who's offered the curators a princely sum for the upkeep of one of the library's finest collections. The job seems like a sinecure, but at Castle Reisenberg, the baron's remote Austrian home, Charles discovers that his host, a noted inventor, is involved in some very dodgy research. His curiosity soon gets him into trouble with the baron, who sets a dog on him and has him carried off to an insane asylum. Only an earlier chance meeting with a local doctor clears the way for his return to England, where his friend Sgt. Wheeler asks for his help with the case of a series of murdered prostitutes whose heads and hearts have been removed. The small holes Charles notices in their necks remind him all too vividly of his trip to Austria, where fear of vampires is widespread among the peasants. Meanwhile, in Whitby, the showman Professor de Caus has returned from abroad with his daughter Lucy, who he fears has gone mad after helping him with a smoke-and-mirrors show that claims to raise the dead. Lucy's unexplainable powers have attracted the attention of the baron, who secretly removes her to London, which is crowded with foreigners visiting the Great Exhibition of 1851, a year when science is battling superstition. The police try to keep the murders secret, but when a reporter breaks the story, near riots ensue. Though Maddox is convinced that the baron is the culprit, proving it and finding Lucy prove to be the most difficult tasks of his career. Another tour de force with a striking finale from Shepherd (A Fatal Likeness, 2013, etc.), who specializes in turning iconic novels into clever, complicated mysteries for her tormented hero to solve.

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September 1, 2014
What if certain classic Victorian works of literatureBleak House, for examplearen't entirely fictional? And what if a British private investigator, namely the struggling and rather scruffy Charles Maddox, keeps getting thrown into cases that involve the authors of those books and their characters? Like Jasper Fforde, in his Thursday Next series, Shepherd explores literary history from a unique angle; but where Fforde's novels are funny fantasies, Shepherd's are darkly serious and feel very real. Here, in the fourth in the series, Charles heads off to investigate a man whose offer of a generous sum of money to the Bodleian Library seems almost too good to be true. It turns out the man, a scientist whose experiments delve deep into uncharted scientific territory, has some pretty enormous secrets and could be connected with a series of particularly gruesome murders being committed by someone dubbed The Vampire. A key character from Bram Stoker's classic horror novel makes an appearance here, and the idea that Stoker's novel was somehow inspired by events surrounding the subject of Maddox's investigation seems tantalizing plausible. Another sterling entry in this imaginative series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)