THE PRICE OF MURDER (Bruce Alexander)

Sir John Fielding, the blind founder of Great Britains' Bow Street Runners, is a sort of Nero Wolfe character, the brains behind the investigations that are carried out for him by his assistant, Jeremy Proctor, his Archie Goodwin.  In The Price of Murder, Jeremy investigates the murder of a young girl whose body is found in a local canal after her mother apparently has sold her.  Jeremy's fiancee, Clarissa Roundtree, gets involved after one of her friends disappears as well.  Alexander, basing his series on the career of real-life magistrate Sir John Fielding in the mid-1800's, has crafted an interesting mystery.  The reader is immersed in the world of Georgian England, including the popular sport of horse racing.  When the murdered girl's uncle, a diminutive jockey improbably named Deuteronomy Plummer, gets involved with the case, complications ensue.  Alexander does an excellent job of moving the reader from the upper-class to the working class to the dregs of society and back again.  As a mystery, I'm not sure I would tout it as competition for Christie or Louise Penny, but the characters are memorable and, in many cases, endearing.  I loved the running sub-plot about Jeremy and Clarissa's planned engagement and Clarissa's decidedly modern attempts to pin Jeremy down to a formal commitment.  I also loved the authentic flavor of the historical setting.  This is the 10th in the Fielding series.  I would consider reading others, especially for the historical detail.