Death Among the Ruins

by Susanna Calkins

Overview

Midnight assignations, dresses fit to meet the queen . . . and murder most horrid! Printer's apprentice Lucy Campion investigates a puzzling death in this thrilling historical mystery set in seventeenth-century London.

London, 1668. Printer's apprentice Lucy Campion is suspicious when she meets a young ragpicker who claims to have fine clothes to sell from a lady of quality. Are the garments stolen . . . or a sign of something worse?

Her suspicions are soon realized when the clothes are identified as belonging to a recently deceased elderly aristocrat. Young Mercy Sykes has robbed a grave! Mercy is arrested, and it's only thanks to Lucy's intervention that the ragpicker, who's struggling to support her family, isn't locked up.

Lucy doesn't expect to see Mercy again, but their meeting soon has unexpected consequences. For when Mercy finds a dead woman in the ruins of Christchurch, dressed in unexpected finery, it's to Lucy who she turns for help . . .

Lucy Campion is a feisty working-class heroine, plying her trade as a printer's apprentice in Renaissance London. If you're new to the series (it's safe to jump right in), we can't wait for you to meet her in this twisty, puzzle-packed historical mystery, brimming with authenticity!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448306169
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Series:	Lucy Campion Series , #7
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	178,850
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Susanna Calkins is the author of the award-winning Lucy Campion mystery series, set in seventeenth century London, and the Speakeasy mysteries, set in Prohibition-era Chicago. She has a PhD in history and works at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she currently lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

Another winning entry in the crisply detailed Lucy Campion series

Booklist

An involving tale. Solid historical mystery, with intriguing hints about the future

Booklist on A Death Along the River Fleet

Packed with intriguing historical details, which ably support a clever plot and a captivating heroine

Booklist on The Cry of the Hangman

A crisply written, cleverly plotted, and nicely detailed historical mystery, with a lively heroine and a satisfying ending

Booklist on The Sign of the Gallows

05/01/2023

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)

Publishers Weekly

2023-05-09
A 17th-century bookseller investigates the death of a maidservant.

Lucy Campion knows that she’s been extraordinarily lucky in life. After she was pressed into service as a housemaid at a young age, her kind employer, Master Adam Hargrave, recognized her intelligence, allowing her to learn to read and write alongside his own children, Adam and Sarah. Now apprenticed to Master Aubrey, a printer, Lucy is free to roam the streets of London with fellow apprentice Lach, hawking broadsides with fantastical tales of their own invention. While reading “The Strange Tale of a Two-Headed Pig” in the marketplace, Lucy overhears ragpicker Mercy Sykes peddling “fine clothes from a lady of qu-quality” to the assembled crowd. Then a woman appears, accusing Mercy of stealing the clothes from her dead mother's grave—and proves it by finding her mother's initials embroidered inside the sleeve. The next day Mercy is back, and this time the body she’s robbed is not buried in a churchyard but hidden in the ruined alleyways scorched by the Great Fire. A brisk inquiry among the local tailors and merchants helps Lucy trace the clothing on this second corpse to Charlotte Mobley, daughter of a wealthy family. But the unfortunate girl Mercy stripped them from was Charlotte’s maid, Effie Jones. Spurred on by the contrast between her own good fortune and Effie’s wretched end, Lucy vows to discover how Effie came to be murdered in the ruins, clothed in her mistress’s finery. Her efforts reveal a dark web of interlocking misdeeds and some hard truths about life in Shakespearean London.

Grisly but witty and colorful.

Kirkus Reviews