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1881: In the Edinburgh Twilight there are some very dark shadows indeed
Edinburgh Twilight
What you need to know before your trail
As a new century approaches, Edinburgh is a city divided. The wealthy residents of New Town live in comfort, while Old Town’s cobblestone streets are clotted with criminals, prostitution, and poverty.
Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton is no stranger to Edinburgh’s darkest crimes. Scarred by the mysterious fire that killed his parents, he faces his toughest case yet when a young man is found strangled in Holyrood Park.
With little evidence aside from a strange playing card found on the body, Hamilton engages the help of his aunt, a gifted photographer, and George Pearson, a librarian with a shared interest in the criminal mind. But the body count is rising. As newspapers spin tales of the “Holyrood Strangler,” panic sets in across the city. And with each victim, the murderer is getting closer to Hamilton, the one man who dares to stop him.
Travel Guide
Visit Edinburgh
The city streets are dark, cobbled, riddled with disease and threatened with violence. People often died of cholera and more. Death stalked the streets and seemed to claim new victims every evening.
“See here, Hamilton, the world is full of evil wretches who seek nothing but their own self-gratification, and they don’t give a damn whom they hurt in the process. We’ll never catch every single one of them“
The times and setting is evoked with references to Robert Burns and his poetry sprinkled throughout the novel
The geography of the city, both the Old and New Town are explored. Edinburgh is a city divided. The wealthy residents of New Town live in comfort, while over in the Old Town, it’s quite another and all together more violent story, Arthur’s Seat, where the crime takes place, overlooks the city and oversees the entire novel too.
Streetview Maps
A) Edinburgh Old Town - Arthur's Seat
E) Edinburgh New Town - Calton Hill
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
There’s something deliciously grim about this novel – set in the days where Edinburgh was even more gothic than it is today. There’s murder, mystery and something almost Sherlockian about it all. Cloak and dagger stuff with more monsters hiding in the shadows than you know what to do with.
It’s the early days of police work and so the basics are only just falling into place – only years before the Jack the Ripper murders would shock the world, the dark, dank streets of Edinburgh seem to have been the ones to fear.
The setting was like a fog of mystery which immersed me into the novel and seeped into my very bones. Edinburgh is brilliantly evoked and cleverly recreated on the page – some good research having gone on here and I wouldn’t be surprised if the author hasn’t been on a few ghost tours.
There was depth to this novel without the gloom of the gothic city however and the subject matter of a character’s homosexuality was something I’d not read about in this way before in a historical novel. There’s scenes of sex and dubious goings on but done in a unique way which adds another level to the overall plot.
And then there’s the rest of the Scottish flavour – the whisky, the bad weather, the Firth of Forth and the accent/dialect and unique language of the city.
A book to cuddle up beside the fire in one way, but with a red hot poker at the ready in another
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Edinburgh Twilight
Destination: Edinburgh Author/Guide: Carole Lawrence Departure Time: 1881
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