The Amateur Historian

The grim fates of two girls separated by more than a century entwine in bizarre fashion in Cole’s ambitious debut, the first in a projected series. More than a century after nine-year-old Esme Percy dies in wretched, Dickensian squalor in 1901 in the ancient English city of York, eight-year-old Polly Markham, the child of well-off parents, is kidnapped in the same city. Two brothers, Rick Rounder, an ex-Yorkshire policeman recently returned to York and now a PI, and his older brother, Sam, York’s chief investigator, play major roles in deciphering the complex abduction case. Rick’s new career gets off to a rocky start as he shadows a straying wife and her paramour, while Sam’s troubled marriage and corpulence make him look and feel older than his 40 or so years. A devilishly complicated plot and the intriguingly mismatched brothers more than compensate for the overwrought descriptions of poverty-stricken York of an earlier era. (June)