The Thief-Taker: Memoirs Of A Bow Street Runner (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
I encountered this book in a search for Sean Russell one of my favorite authors. It seems as though Mr. Russell co-authored this book along with Ian Dennis which alone makes it worth exploring. I think Sean Russell is a brilliant science fiction writer who not only just happens to have authored one of my all-time favorite series, but actually answered an email when I wrote him to discuss one of his books. All that aside, his stories are interesting and amazingly diverse and this story was no exception.The Thief Taker: Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner was a most engaging and easy to read period piece circa Victorian England in the year 1815. It is a police mystery that takes place prior to Scotland Yard when police work was on commission and the public not too enamored of its officers. The mystery unravels slowly pulling the reader page by page into a world now almost two hundred years old. The characters are likeable, the dialog fun and the story has enough grit and substance to keep things moving at a good pace: neither too fast nor too slow. By the end of the story I wanted to know more about Henry Morton, the honest, hard working, sensitive and thoughtful policeman, aka, Bow Street runner, who among other things liked to get in the boxing ring with the famous poet of the time, Lord Byron.For anyone new to Sean Russell, his stories are meant to be savored, his worlds to be experienced slowly using all of your senses. In this regard, The Thief Taker was not as detailed or richly rendered as some of his earlier works, but then again, this book was a collaboration. Never the less, I found the story's setting most satisfying and even somewhat enchanting even with the subject matter being criminal.
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