The Devil's Company

May 18, 2009
In Edgar-winner Liss’s enjoyable third thriller to feature the estimable Benjamin Weaver, an 18th-century London “thieftaker” (after A Spectacle of Corruption
and A Conspiracy of Paper
), Weaver finds himself working reluctantly for a mysterious gentleman, Jerome Cobb. On Cobb’s orders, Weaver takes employment as a security man at the British East India Company’s headquarters, where he tries to obtain information about the death of one Absalom Pepper, of whom virtually nothing is known. To keep Weaver in line, Cobb has blackmailed Weaver’s friend Moses Franco, close confederate Elias Gordon and his beloved uncle Miguel. As usual, several beautiful women play roles in the complicated plot, which involves industrial spying and the international textile trade. Weaver’s two previous adventures could sometimes bog down in arcane financial and political detail, but Liss keeps the suspense at full boil and the action rolling swiftly ahead.

August 31, 2009
Liss's novel dissects the corrupt underbelly of 18th-century commerce, politics and religion. Benjamin Weaver, a “thief taker,” is blackmailed into spying on the powerful British East India Company, while a variety of undercover and double agents keep their eyes on him. The audio version is enhanced by a stirring performance by Simon Vance. His rendition of Weaver as crafty but moralistic is nearly perfect, though Weaver comes across as more educated and middle class than Liss intended. But in tackling a long novel rife with dialogue, Vance performs a huge cast that reflects the London society of 1722, including merchants, textile workers, accountants, security guards, a Scottish physician, Portuguese Jews, French spies, street urchins, plus the denizens of many a tavern and brothel. A wide audience will be delighted by this fast-paced thriller, thanks to Vance's deft dramatization. A Random hardcover (Reviews, May 18).

July 15, 2009
The Edgar Award winner's serial protagonist Benjamin Weaver (The Whiskey Rebels, 2008, etc.) grapples with financial chicanery and diversified villains in 18th-century London.

Someone has provoked the vengeful ire of wealthy Jerome Cobb, who engages Benjamin, a burly thieftaker and constable for hire (think Dog the Bounty Hunter with a more elevated habit of speech and a courtlier demeanor), to look into the suspicious death of one Absalom Pepper—whose sole known characteristic, apparently, is his ridiculous name. As Benjamin plies his unauthorized trade, gentlemanly and socially insignificant bad guys pop up everywhere, sorely testing his brains and brawn (he's also an expert pugilist). Some of Benjamin's best friends and dearest relations, it turns out, have made the unstable Cobb's ever-lengthening enemies list. For example, Benjamin's beloved uncle Miguel Lienzo, a prosperous importer who himself played detective most engagingly in The Coffee Trader (2003), has seen a costly cargo of wine"lost" while being shipped from Europe to England. As the plots thicken, blood is spilled, beautiful women are compromised; the powerful East India Company is victimized by commercial espionage; and almost everybody's trusted servant seems to be working for a minimum of two masters. The signature flaw in the author's impressively erudite series is his passion to educate us. So much specific historical, cultural, industrial and commercial information is crammed into this otherwise streamlined narrative that the reader's brain seizes up in self-defense, hoping to avert overload; in the process, alas, it's easy to get lost from chapter to chapter. Reading Liss is almost as much of a task as a pleasure, but it is a pleasure, and for those who hang in there, the rewards are quite considerable.

Witty and stimulating, albeit demanding, entertainment.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
Liss's sixth novel marks the return of Benjamin Weaver, last seen in "A Spectacle of Corruption". Weaver is probably Liss's most popular and enduring character; perhaps, as the ultimate outsider caught up in a struggle against the most powerful forces of 18th-century English society, he seems to embody the spirit of the author's historical thrillers. Here the renowned thief-taker agrees to an assignment that promises quick money, but when things go awry he ends up deeply in debt, ensnared by the mysterious figure Jerome Cobb into stealing documents from the notorious East India Company. The theft is just the first turn in an increasingly intricate plot, involving shadowy figures, the English government, and foreign spies. VERDICT This fast-paced and entertaining look at 1790s London will appeal to Liss's fans as well those readers who enjoy the historical thrillers of Matthew Pearl. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/1/09.]Douglas Southard, CRA International, Boston

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Liss third Benjamin Weaver novel finds the eighteenth-century British thief-taker (a kind of detective specializing in recovering stolen goods) on the wrong end of an elaborate scam. A secretive businessman, Mr. Cobb, has bought the debts of Weavers uncle and two friends and threatens to throw them all into debtors prison if Weaver doesnt do his bidding: gather information that could be used against Londons formidable East India Company. Reluctantly, Weaver is on the case, but his real agenda is to save his friends and use whatever information he uncovers against Cobb and his henchmen. As in the previous Weaver adventures, A Conspiracy of Paper (2000), about Exchange Alley, center of the eighteenth-century British stock trading, and A Spectacle of Corruption (2004), about the world of bare-knuckle politics, Liss probes another insular community, silk traders, whose tentacles extend deep into every fabric of British economic and social life. His portrait of the East India Company could stand as a treatise on the birth of todays megacorporation: rife with historical detail and philosophical rumination on the proper relationship between business and government, it offers context on issues that continue to fuel debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but it does so not with pontificating economists but with a cast of robust Dickensian characters who wear their individuality on their silky sleeves. If the plot twists itself into a too-elaborate knot this time, requiring some awkward untwisting at the end, it interferes only slightly with our enjoyment of the novel. For every English major who flunked economics, Liss is here to complete our education in a way we can understand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)