At the start, police in Euston Station discover a trunk stuffed with the corpse of a Scotland Yard inspector. In this mist of bonhomous closure, the suspense of a thriller fades. What feels like a third of the novel is devoted to their good deeds and subsequent mutual congratulation. Its heroes get shallower, not deeper, until by the book’s conclusion they seem like moralizing contemporary stick figures, freed from the complexity of their time. A detective describing his sense of responsibility to the families of murder victims employs a 1990s buzzword that it’s exceedingly unlikely would have entered the mind, much less the mouth, of a man in 1889: “closure.” The Yard has a great many virtues, including a Dickensian profusion of memorable minor characters, but this misstep lays bare its most serious flaw. To hunt for anachronisms in historical fiction is a churlish hobby, but there’s a telling one in Alex Grecian’s affable first novel, a Victorian thriller.
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