Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar

Starred review from October 28, 2019
Set in 1851, Saunders’s excellent sequel to 2016’s The Secrets of Wishtide opens with 53-year-old Laetitia Rodd, a clergyman’s widow who does inquiries to supplement her meager income, hearing a plea from Jacob Welland, a fellow Hampstead resident who’s dying of consumption. Jacob wants her to find his younger brother, Joshua, from whom he became estranged after Jacob wooed and married Joshua’s love some 15 years before, so he can make amends. Joshua has been living “like a wild creature, in hedges and ditches” around Oxford in the years since a breakdown ended his studies at Oxford University. To facilitate her search, Mrs. Rodd stays with clergyman Arthur Somers and his wife, Rachel, outside Oxford. Though Somers’s obsessive High Church practices disturb her, she gleans useful information from parish curate Henry Barton, a friendly Oxford don. When Arthur is poisoned, Henry and Rachel, who Mrs. Rodd has guessed love each other, are arrested for the crime, and she strives to prove their innocence. Saunders’s exquisite prose and patient storytelling build a convincing Victorian voice, while Mrs. Rodd’s shrewd, energetic narration adds further appeal to the rich depiction of 19th-century landscapes and attitudes. Mainstream readers who appreciate Victorian fiction will be rewarded. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt.

Starred review from October 1, 2019
One part Victorian social history and one part mystery, the second in a new series starring a Victorian woman detective (after The Secrets of Wishtide, 2016) is a totally beguiling read. Its heroine, Laetitia Rodd, is a genteel but poor widow of an archdeacon, and the sister of a London criminal barrister. When her brother asks her to investigate some puzzles he's come across, Laetitia's near-poverty propels her to earn some extra money, and the combined status of dead archdeacon husband and barrister brother allow her to float easily from hovels to rectories to country houses. The case Laetitia's brother gives her this time has a tight deadline: a wealthy man who is about to die of consumption wants to find his estranged brother and reconcile with him. The brother was a brilliant Oxford scholar, but poverty and madness drove him into the countryside. The author is marvelous at working in what life was like in 1851 England through telling details. For example, the wealthy used to summer in the country to escape cholera outbreaks; consumption tore through families; prayers were embroidered into baby caps, a sign of high infant mortality. The mystery escalates into blackmail and then murder. Throughout it all, Laetitia, practical and canny, makes a marvelous companion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)