The House on Vesper Sands

This is the first novel of Pairaic O'Donnell's to be published in the U.S., although he one previous novel published in the U.K.; he is also a critic and poet. This is a Victorian gothic ghost tale of sorts, set in 1890's London when high society women sponsored seances and spiritualism was wildly popular fare. The protagonist is one DI Cutter of Scotland Yard and he comes to be assisted in a very circuitous fashion by a drop out from Cambridge's divinity school, Gideon Bliss. Gideon has come to London at his uncle's request, made in a letter suggesting that he and some of the poor working women he ministered to were being threatened. Coincidentally, Gideon's uncle, the Rev. Herbert Neuilly, lives in the same boarding house as DI Cutter but has not been seen for days. Moreover, the particular woman Rev. Neuilly was worried about, Angela Tatton, was someone for whom Gideon had secret loving feelings, and she has also disappeared. Gideon desperately contrives to present himself to Cutter as a police sergeant in order to try and find Angela and his uncle, although Cutter is fairly quick to see through the charade. Nevertheless, they together begin the hunt to solve not only the mystery of several women who have disappeared, captured and killed by Spiriters according to the press, but also the suicide of a seamstress who jumped to her death from the top floor of well-to-do Lord Strythe's manse. A parallel storyline and investigation are being carried out by unconventional Octavia Hillingdon, an aspiring journalist who wants to do something more than write society gossip and who is persuaded by her publisher to pursue the story of the missing women. The book is atmospheric and dark, although relieved occasionally by the interchanges between Gideon and snarky DI Cutter. Publishers Weekly asserts, "O’Donnell excels at concocting eerie scenes.Yet he’s also very funny, particularly in exchanges between the profane Cutter and the verbose but perceptive Bliss." Even though the book starts with a dramatic event, it felt slow in the beginning; however, persistence paid off as the book reaches a satisfying conclusion.

The Guardian says of this book, "O’Donnell has pulled off with brio something that might, in a lesser writer’s hands, have fallen horribly flat: he has written a coherent and satisfying novel that is both disquietingly eerie and properly funny." At the conclusion of Kirkus' amusing review they note, "Author O’Donnell carefully unspools the gothic creepiness of his story, teasing the reader with tidbits of information that raise more questions than they answer...An intriguing, unexpected gothic mashup with elements of Dorothy Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Josephine Tey."