In Victorian London, Leo Stanhope is leading a difficult existence as a clerk for a hospital mortuary. His only extravagance is a weekly trip to the whorehouse, where he meets Maria, with whom he is madly in love. She is one of only a few people who knows his secret—that he was born a girl but has always believed he’s a boy. At 15, he left a comfortable home to live as a man.
One day the body of a murdered woman arrives at the mortuary. It is Maria, who did not turn up for the date they had for Saturday. Leo is soon brought in for questioning, but he is let go, and he becomes obsessed with trying to find Maria’s killer. He believes that her death may be related to that of another corpse brought in a few days before.
Of course, Leo finds that almost nothing Maria told him about herself was true, and that leads me to the first general discomfort I had with this novel even before Maria’s body turned up. That is, I really hate the trope of a young man being obsessed with a woman who is leading him on, especially one who exhibits stalker behaviors. If that wasn’t bad enough, Reeve puts Leo through so much physical and mental torment before he’s through that it made me very uncomfortable.
I think the mystery was complex and interesting, but Leo, who is self-obsessed and humorless, reminded me a lot of C. J. Sansom’s depressing hero, Matthew Shardlake. At one point, another character tries to point out that he is not only jeopardizing his own life but hers, but he thinks only of himself and continues to go on the same way.
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I liked this one and went on to read the rest of the series, which I thought got better with each book, but I understand why it made you uncomfortable. Leo goes through such a lot in this book and it does become quite disturbing.
Yes, and I read all the books of that Sansom series, and Shardlake never lightened up at all.
Coincidentally, I read a review of this somewhere recently and ended up looking up the reviews on Goodreads. The one star reviews tell me that you weren’t alone in being made to feel uncomfortable! It does sound as if the author has picked just about everything awful that could happen to a trans man and dumped it all on this poor character.
Yep, that’s about it.