Death Among the Ruins

Calkins’s seventh whodunit featuring Lucy Campion, 17th-century London servant turned printer’s apprentice (after 2021’s The Cry of the Hangman), pales in comparison to prior entries. While selling her boss’s publications, Lucy happens upon rag seller Mercy Sykes, who’s been accused of robbing finery from a corpse in order to sell it; she claims she did so under duress from a thug who assaulted her and threatened her sister. Sympathetic, Lucy persuades her friend, Constable Duncan, not to pursue charges against the woman. Sykes reenters Campion’s life when she appears at the latter’s printing office to seek help after finding a female corpse in the street with head wounds that suggest foul play. Seeking to identify the woman and find her killer, Campion launches an inquiry that takes her to the household of a shadowy government banker. While Campion is pleasant enough company, and series fans may be satisfied by a few new developments in her personal life, Calkins fails to make this investigation memorable—the central mystery is resolved in a disappointingly anticlimactic deus ex machina. This is unlikely to win any new converts to the series. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management. (June)