Tag: Antonia Hodgson

Review 2078: The Silver Collar

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Antonia Hodgson states in the Notes to The Silver Collar that she intended to write this novel from the very beginning of the Thomas Hawkins series. The Silver Collar is the fourth book in the series.

It’s 1728. Things are going well for Thomas Hawkins and his beloved Kitty Sparks, but Thomas begins to feel discontented because he is being supported by Kitty’s wealth and her pornographic bookstore. Then the couple quarrel because Thomas learns she has secretly been seeing Magistrate Gonson, who recently got him unjustly convicted of murder.

After they argue, Thomas stomps out. He returns to find out belatedly two things—Kitty is pregnant and Magistrate Gonson has conspired to help her mother, Lady VanHook, kidnap her.

Thomas knows that Kitty is terrified of her mother, whose intentions are twofold—to take over Kitty’s fortune and to torment Kitty. Finding her pregnant adds some spice. Thomas gets help from Jeremiah, a black man whose little daughter is enslaved by Lady VanHook, and from Sam and Gabriela Fleet. They find that Kitty has been incarcerated in an insane asylum, but that’s just the beginning of this fast-moving, adventurous novel.

There was one place where the pace slowed to a slog, and that was in reading Jeremiah’s letter, which was too long and went into too much extraneous detail. Hodgson created a trap for herself when she gave him speech problems, because this section would have worked much better as a dialogue. However, in all, this was an exciting entry in the series.

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Review 2018: A Death at Fountains Abbey

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Thomas Hawkins escaped from the gallows at the end of the last book in this series, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, but Queen Caroline is still holding a threat over him—her knowledge that his beloved Kitty is a murderess. The Queen has received a request for help from John Aislabie, who has been threatened by mysterious letters. But Aislabie was the mastermind behind the South Sea Company scam, and the Queen fears that he did not destroy the green ledger of its accounts, which would show how much the Crown gained from the scam while so many others were ruined. So, she sends Thomas ostensibly to help Aislabie but really to search for the ledger. He takes with him Kitty, who now poses as his wife, and his dangerous ward, Sam Fleet.

In Yorkshire, he finds Aislabie behaving like a victim of the South Sea scandal instead of its perpetrator, claiming he took the fall for more important people. Yet he seems to have plenty of money, which he is spending on his horses and his grounds. He is not well liked, claiming common land as his own and proclaiming as poachers the families that have farmed and hunted it for centuries. In fact, Thomas finds no lack of suspects for the nasty threats Aislabie has received.

Another strange situation concerns Mrs. Fairwood, who is living with the Aislabies. She has presented herself as his daughter, thought to have been killed in a house fire thirty years before. As her bona fides she has brought along a letter from a servant who disappeared on the day of the fire and a brooch that belonged to Aislabie’s first wife, who also died in the fire. Mrs. Fairwood is also being threatened.

This is another excellent mystery/thriller in this series with its scapegrace hero and heroine. The series books always seem carefully researched and the settings authentic. The ending is quite suspenseful.

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Review 1635: The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins

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This sequel to The Devil in the Marshalsea is lots of fun. The opening of The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins finds our reluctant, roguish protagonist on the way to the gallows. There have been rumors in the neighborhood that he murdered a man in the Borough, but this isn’t the crime he’s been found guilty of.

The story begins with Tom in the street at night on the way home from his usual carouse. He hears the cry of “Thief” from inside the house of his neighbor, Mr. Burden, but when he tries to help, the neighbor becomes abusive. It is Mr. Burden who has been spreading the rumors about Tom.

When Mr. Gonson, the magistrate, comes to investigate the supposed crime, Tom finds that Mr. Burden is accusing Sam Fleet, the nephew of Samuel Fleet, Tom’s friend who was murdered in the Marshalsea in the previous novel, a boy that Tom is supposed to be teaching to be a gentleman. Later, Tom, in a drunken rage, hammers on the Burdens’ door and threatens Burden’s life.

Tip: If you’re in a drunken rage, never threaten anyone’s life. The next night, of course, Burden is murdered, which Tom and his girlfriend Kitty discover when they find Burden’s maid Alice in their house covered with blood. She has come through a secret passage into their house after finding her employer dead. Tom knows that if the authorities find the passage, which he didn’t know about, they’ll assume he is the murderer. The magistrate arrests him anyway, upon no evidence, but then must release him.

Tom also finds himself embroiled in the affairs of Henrietta Howard, the King’s mistress. He undertakes a job, hired by Sam’s father James Fleet, the king of the London underworld, to meet a lady in the park. The lady is Henrietta Howard, whom he finds being attacked by her own husband, Charles. Tom is hired by Queen Caroline to try to find some dark secret to put pressure on Howard, who is trying to blackmail King George by threatening to force Mrs. Howard to return to him.

This novel is atmospheric of Georgian England, especially the nasty places, and full of adventure. It is also quite suspenseful.

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Day 692: The Devil in the Marshalsea

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Cover for The Devil in the MarshalseaTom Hawkins has been leading a dissolute life ever since his ordination ceremony was sabotaged by his stepbrother’s reports of his behavior at school. In a desperate attempt to save himself from debtor’s prison, he goes out gambling with his disapproving friend Charles and manages to win enough money to save himself. But on the way home, he is attacked and robbed of everything. Soon, he is on his way to the Marshalsea.

In 1727, the Marshalsea is not the place Dickens described in Little Dorrit. Although Dickens’ prison was a place of lost hope, in the early 18th century, the Marshalsea is a hell-hole run by a venal and vicious governor, Mr. Acton. Hawkins is astounded to find that it costs more to live in the Marshalsea than it does outside, and if you can’t pay your lodging you will be banished to the horrors of the Common Side, from which bodies are brought out daily. Hawkins has no money at all except what he gets for pawning his mother’s cross and a bit of money from Charles.

To support himself, Hawkins takes on the job of investigating the death of another debtor, Captain Roberts. Although Roberts’ death was deemed a suicide, it was almost certainly a murder, and his ghost is reported as roaming the prison.

Hawkins has taken Roberts’ room, so his roommate is Samuel Fleet, whom all of the prison inhabitants fear. Fleet claims to have been asleep when Roberts’ body was dragged from the room that night. But Hawkins soon observes that Fleet never sleeps.

This novel is terrific. It is thoroughly researched and richly imagined so that both the setting and characters come to life. Hodgson explains at the back of the book that many of the characters are based on actual historical figures. This is Hodgson’s first book, and I’ll be looking for more.

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