From Publishers Weekly
The prolific Taylor (the Roth trilogy, etc.) successfully channels Wilkie Collins in his latest effort, crafting a fluid, atmospheric period thriller. Thomas Shield is a young schoolmaster in Stoke Newington, just outside of London, whose charges include 10-year-old Edgar Allan Poe (as a child, the poet spent five years in England) and a pampered banker's son. The school's routine is disrupted when Shield runs across an eccentric character who displays an unhealthy interest in the two boys. His intervention brings Shield into closer contact with the banker's family and two desirable women. Uncomfortably occupying an uncertain position between master and servant, Shield juggles his instincts for self-preservation with his passions, a task made much harder when the severely mutilated corpse of the banker is discovered shortly after his business collapses. While the murder appears to give Shield a clear path to court the attractive widow, he is unable to ignore clues suggesting that the body is actually someone else's. The enigmatic nature of the protagonist a principled but often passive figure distances him from the reader. Although Taylor does an excellent job in portraying early 19th-century London and writes in a clear, consistent period style, the numerous foreboding references suggest a dramatic psychological twist or a surprising revelation concerning the killer's identity that does not materialize. The use of Poe as a character borders on gratuitous, despite the author's incorporation of biographical details; the youth is peripheral to the plot, and a fictional character could have been substituted with little discernible effect. While this effort is not as successful as Charles Palliser's superb, intricately plotted 19th-century thriller The Quincunx, it is a pleasurable read that will engross many. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Nevermore Sometimes audacity pays off. And you sure have to have a lot of chutzpah to attempt the kind of high-stakes literary heist that Andrew Taylor has masterminded in An Unpardonable Crime (Hyperion, $24.95). For starters, stickyfingers Taylor grabs hold of the 19th-century novel and runs. An Unpardonable Crime is neither an homage to nor an ironic modernist wink at the 19th-century novel, it is a 19th-century novel -- the gloomier sort Dickens wrote toward the end of his life, when Fate and Coincidence seemed less like acts of grace and more like taunts lobbed at humankind by the Great Puppeteer. Taylor's sweeping mystery tale is populated by innocents, eccentrics and evildoers whose lives twist, turn and overlap in a brilliantly intricate pattern.At the dead center of the labyrinth sits Edgar Allan Poe. That's right: Taylor has kidnapped the Father of the Detective Story and plunked him down in this novel that recounts -- and has the nerve to solve -- two real-life mysteries that haunt Poe's life. First, there's the disappearance of his actor-father when Poe was a small child; second, there's Poe's own unexplained disappearance just before his death. (The Master of the Macabre vanished in Virginia and reappeared a week later in Baltimore, where he died, raving.) Given the risks of such bold biographical and novelistic thievery, anything less than a perfectly calibrated fictional performance by Taylor would set off the critical alarm bells. Luckily, in writing An Unpardonable Crime, he has also pulled off "the perfect crime." This is a stunning mystery: intelligent, ambitious in its construction, moving and, as befits its Poe-ish origins, genuinely frightening.The story focuses primarily on the years 1819-20, and features as its hero and narrator a solitary young man named Thomas Shield. Shield's nerves are shot -- he was cited for bravery during the Napoleonic Wars but suffered for years afterward from what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Through the intercession of his dying aunt, Shield finds work as an assistant teacher at a boys' boarding school outside London where he encounters two pupils who look disturbingly like twins: One is named Charlie Frant, the other Edgar Allan. (Poe lived in England between the ages of 6 and 11 while his foster father, John Allan, struggled to set up a London branch of his business.) Shield is drawn into the society of the turbulent Frant family, serving as a tutor to Charlie and his close friend Edgar during school holidays. When Charlie's beautiful mother is left widowed upon the ghastly death of her husband, Shield foolishly hopes to become a more permanent fixture in the Frant circle. Slowly, he realizes that he's been flattered above his station for a purpose.That's just a dip into this maelstrom of a tale that features duplicitous servants, femmes fatale, ancestral piles, stolen jewels, missing fingers and sub-subplots about war profiteering in the States, shady bank dealings and unholy loves. Certainly some of the huge pleasure of reading An Unpardonable Crime derives from clutching at all the literary allusions flying about. Taylor nods to Poe's trademark terrors -- live burials, pits, sinister doubles -- but there are also strains of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the Gothic gloom of all three Brontë sisters and, as noted, Dickens's later, darker masterpieces. An Unpardonable Crime is much more, however, than the sum of its "borrowed" parts. This is a mystery that creates its own vividly unsettling world. The odd mood of that world stays with a reader long after all the hidden identities have been unmasked and all the crypt doors have been fastened tight.Triple-Decker Thrills John Dunning's erudite "Bookman" series does most of its traveling back in time via the musty old volumes that its hero, Cliff Janeway, scouts for his rare book business. In The Bookman's Promise (Scribner, $25), Janeway has just bought himself a doozy of an armchair time-travel aid: He's paid close to $30,000 at auction for a three-decker edition of Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, by the Victorian explorer and notorious man of letters Richard Burton. Janeway should be nestling in to enjoy his luxurious read, but he makes the mistake of accepting an invitation to go on National Public Radio to talk about rare books in general and the Burton book in particular. Shortly thereafter, an elderly woman named Josephine Gallant turns up at his store. ("She was not just old, she was a human redwood.") Gallant claims that Janeway's prize acquisition was part of a Burton collection pillaged from her grandfather's library in 1906. Most lesser humans would dismiss the old gal's claims -- especially since she passes away hours after the meeting. But Janeway is an old-fashioned man of honor, and his determination to track down the provenance of the Burton volumes intensifies when a friend safeguarding the literary treasure is murdered.The Bookman's Promise itself is a volume that fans of the "Bookman" series will be delighted to add to their crime libraries. In addition to serving up the familiar trademarks of this series -- Janeway's rueful worldview and the enlightening tidbits about rare books scattered throughout the story -- the novel ambitiously conjures up a lost journal about Burton's rumored espionage work in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. As gilding on the pages here, Janeway even finds romance in this latest outing -- with a woman who can quote James M. Cain, no less!In a Good CauseRebecca Pawel set the mystery world agog last year with her debut historical novel, Death of a Nationalist, which takes place in Madrid immediately after the Spanish Civil War. That Pawel was only 25 years old and still could offer such a nuanced understanding of the politics and social conventions of the times was one cause for wonder. The other marvel was the novel's resistance to sentimentality: The good characters behave in spectacularly foolish and sometimes cowardly ways. Moreover, Pawel's main character, Carlos Tejada Alonso y Léon, is a sergeant in the Guardia Civil and a dedicated supporter of the conservative Catholic Franquista cause. Given the judgment of history, a Republican rather than a Nationalist would have been a more politically congenial choice for a hero. The courage of imagination that Pawel demonstrated throughout that first novel stoked critical anticipation for a sequel.Well, here it is. Law of Return (Soho, $24) is set in the university city of Salamanca, where Tejada, now a lieutenant, has been transferred for a tour of duty. Coincidentally, Salamanca is also the city where Elena Fernandez, Tejada's left-leaning love interest, has moved to be with her aged parents. (She's particularly protective of her father, a former classics professor and supporter of Miguel de Unamuno, the great poet who was ousted from his post as rector of the University of Salamanca in 1936 because of his dissenting political views.) To put it mildly, Elena and Tejada are stationed in opposite trenches when it comes to politics; that Pawel has caved in and allowed these two starcrossed lovers to reach an accord is both satisfying and disappointing, since that happy turn of events signals that Law of Return is less morally complicated than its predecessor.Still, there's plenty to admire in this mystery that intertwines plots about the disappearance of a paroled political prisoner and the clandestine efforts of Elena's father to smuggle a Jewish colleague out of occupied France. Elena takes center stage in this latter tale of wartime suspense, since she has the freedom of movement that her father lacks. (As a known dissident, he must report in to Tejada for weekly police checks.) The "law of return" of the novel's title alludes to a 1924 ruling permitting Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain to reclaim their Spanish citizenship. The title also refers to the reunion of Tejada and Elena, whose future happiness will rest on a scrupulous avoidance of the hotbed issues of religion and politics.The MissingWhat's left to discuss, then, is the weather, and weather -- gray, chilly, wet -- is a brooding element in Karin Fossum's police procedural Don't Look Back (Harcourt, $23), which has been translated from the Norwegian by Felicity David. Fossum's novels starring Inspector Konrad Sejer have been critically acclaimed throughout Europe, and it's easy to see why. Sejer is one of those deadpan police philosopher types the Northern climes generate. (Think of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or Maj Sowall's and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck.) A widower whose loneliness is eased by his dog and drink, Sejer lives for his work and for the occasional visits of his daughter and small grandson.Don't Look Back toys with the terrible theme of the many ways a parent can lose a beloved child. It opens with the disappearance of a little girl in an isolated Norwegian village. As Sejer and his team desperately try to track down the child, readers are told that "their unease was growing steadily, like a dead spot in the chest where the blood refused to flow." Yet, even as that storyline swerves away from its dread resolution, another horror presents itself. The unclothed corpse of a teenaged girl -- a popular babysitter in the village -- is discovered at the edge of a mountain lake. Annie Holland was tall, muscular and aloof; in short, not the kind of girl one would think of as vulnerable to attack. As Sejer delves into Annie's background, the puzzles multiply. Every man in Annie's life, Sejer learns, is hiding sins; but then Annie turns out to have been harboring some grim secrets, too. Echo EffectAnother spring, another Spenser novel. Bad Business (Putnam, $24.95), by Robert B. Parker, is kind of a screwball hard-boiled. A beautiful woman (again) walks into Spenser's Boston office and hires him to gather evidence against her two-timing husband in preparation for the divorce she's about to request. As Spenser begins tailing the husband, he realizes that another private investigator is tailing him. So he begins tailing the tail and unearths a thin layer of subplots about open marriages, pop-psychologist conmen and sex clubs in suburbia.Anyone (like me) still addictively reading the Spenser books at this diminished moment in the series's long history knows that expectations must be lowered. There's neither suspense nor much provocative social commentary in Bad Business, but every so often there are echoes of Spenser's saucy humor and razzmatazz dialogue. When Marlene Rowley, the beautiful client, walks into Spenser's office, he describes her thus:"She was good-looking in kind of an old-fashioned way. Sort of womanly. Before personal trainers, and StairMasters. . . . Her reddish blond hair was long and thoroughly sprayed. . . . Her mouth was kind of thin and her eyes were small. I imagined cheating on her." Okay, I said "echoes." Reviewed by Maureen CorriganCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From AudioFile
The author was awarded the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger an unprecedented two times. His second was for this historical murder mystery set in rural England. A poor tutor, Thomas Shield, tells of his unwelcome involvement in a set of murders in 1819, in which a young American boy named Edgar Allan Poe figures prominently. The adroitly abridged whodunit retains the flavor of its Dickensian characters, convincing yet accessible Georgian diction, and intriguing entangled narrative. All these virtues are beautifully orchestrated by the incomparable Sir Derek Jacobi, who contributes his masterful technique, facility with characterizations, and gently mellifluous cadences. He wraps the whole in an atmosphere that conjures images of period etchings with their deep chiaroscuro. Well-chosen musical accents nicely punctuate the reading and help move the action forward. Altogether a tasteful, even artistic, rendering of popular fiction. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Taylor's novel was published in 2003 in the UK as The American Boy. The title character is Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in England from 1816 to 1820 while his foster father, John Allan, set up a British branch of his import-export business. This literary-historical mystery (whose new title nabs a line from Poe's story "William Wilson") incorporates the boyhood Poe, the mystery of the disappearance of Poe's biological father when Poe was an infant, and the later mystery of Poe's behavior and disappearance before his death into a Regency drama of crossed love, class barriers, embezzlement, and murder. All of this comes about through the character of Thomas Shield, Poe's teacher at boarding school, who gets drawn into the wealthy boy's life and into a series of mysteries surrounding the boy. Wonderful evocations of Regency England, suggestive about the later horrors in Poe's life, marred a bit by a cumbersome (almost 500-page) plot and delivery. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Denver Post
". . . a remarkable thriller, elegantly written . . . a work of superlative fiction."


Charles Palliser
"An absolutely unputdownable read."


Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen
"Easily one of the best books I've read this year, a fabulous mystery."


Publishers Weekly
"A fluid, atmospheric period thriller."


Minneapolis Star Tribune
". . . a moody, delightful Gothic thriller . . . The period details are pitch perfect."


London Times
"A wonderful book, richly composed and beautifully written, an enthralling read from start to finish."


The Times (of London)
"One of Britain's best writers of psychological suspense."


Harriet Waugh, The Spectator
"The most interesting novelist writing on crime in England today."


Eric Buscher, Posman Books
"The story is dark and compelling, and I was absorbed from the beginning."


People magazine
". . . full of pithy observations . . . Taylor constructs an entertaining, sometimes enchanting, world."


Book Description
England 1819. Two enigmatic Americans arrive in London and soon after a bank collapses. A man is found dead on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stews of the city's notorious Seven Dials district. A deathbed vigil ends in an act of theft, and a beautiful heiress flirts with her inferiors. A strange destiny connects each of these events to an American boy, Edgar Allan Poe, who was brought to England by his foster father and sent to the leafy village of Stoke Newington to be educated. An Unpardonable Crime is a twenty-first-century novel with a nineteenth-century voice. It is both a multilayered literary murder mystery and a love story, its setting ranging from the coal-scented fogs of late-Regency London to the stark winter landscapes of Gloucestershire. And at its center is the boy who does not really belong anywhere, an actor who never learns the significance of his part.


About the Author
Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of novels, including a crime series, a psychological thriller, and the groundbreaking Roth Trilogy. He and his wife live with their children in England.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

England 1819. Two enigmatic Americans arrive in London and soon after a bank collapses. A man is found dead on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stews of the city's notorious Seven Dials district. A deathbed vigil ends in an act of theft, and a beautiful heiress flirts with her inferiors. A strange destiny connects each of these events to an American boy, Edgar Allan Poe, who was brought to England by his foster father and sent to the leafy village of Stoke Newington to be educated.

Soon the intrigue enmeshes a poor schoolteacher, Thomas Shield, who struggles to understand what is happening before it destroys him and those he loves. But the truth, like the youthful Poe himself, has its origins in the New World as well as the Old.

FROM THE CRITICS

Houston Chronicle

A timeless story about arrogance, obsession and justification.

People magazine

. . full of pithy observations . . . Taylor constructs an entertaining, sometimes enchanting, world.

The New York Times

For his hard work, Andrew Taylor deserves the attention of readers of detective stories who do not expect to find work that transcends its genre. — Frederick Busch

The Washington Post

Sometimes audacity pays off. And you sure have to have a lot of chutzpah to attempt the kind of high-stakes literary heist that Andrew Taylor has masterminded in An Unpardonable Crime. For starters, stickyfingers Taylor grabs hold of the 19th-century novel and runs. An Unpardonable Crime is neither an homage to nor an ironic modernist wink at the 19th-century novel, it is a 19th-century novel -- the gloomier sort Dickens wrote toward the end of his life, when Fate and Coincidence seemed less like acts of grace and more like taunts lobbed at humankind by the Great Puppeteer. Taylor's sweeping mystery tale is populated by innocents, eccentrics and evildoers whose lives twist, turn and overlap in a brilliantly intricate pattern. — Maureen Corrigan

Denver Post

. . a remarkable thriller, elegantly written . . . a work of superlative fiction.Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Eric Buscher