A Death Along the River Fleet

At the start of Calkins’s sluggish fourth mystery set in 1660s London (after 2015’s The Masque of a Murderer), printer’s apprentice Lucy Campion encounters a bruised, bloodstained, and incoherent woman on a bridge while crossing the Fleet River. She brings the stranger to the home of her friend Dr. Larimer, who notices rope marks and signs of medical bloodletting before diagnosing hysteria and traumatic amnesia. After the doctor arranges for Lucy to care for the patient in his home, she’s revealed to be Octavia Belasysse, an epileptic noblewoman believed dead by her dysfunctional family. When Octavia’s brother turns up missing and a murdered corpse is found near where she was wandering, Constable Jeb Duncan, Lucy’s beau, suspects that the noblewoman may be criminal as well as victim. Calkins deftly evokes period attitudes toward mental illness, but with a pivotal character too impaired to generate much suspense or action, the first half of the story doesn’t do justice to Lucy’s resourcefulness or the author’s full gifts. [em]Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management. (Apr.) [/em]