The Diabolical Bones

September 1, 2020
Skeletal remains attract the sympathy and scrutiny of a not-yet-famous trio of Victorian-era sisters. The faithful housekeeper of the Bront� sisters--Charlotte, Emily, and Anne--disturbs a quiet afternoon in December 1845 with dreadful news. Clifton Bradshaw, the owner of Top Withens Hall, has uncovered a bundle of child's bones in the chimney niche in his late wife's rooms, shut up since her death 13 years earlier. The sisters, daughters of a parson, are concerned with the soul of the child and the reason the bones were hidden away. Emily is particularly impatient because their last case as detectors, in which they styled themselves Bell Brothers and Company, was just a search for a missing cow. The three women and their brother, Branwell, brave the winter snows and the wrath of Bradshaw, who's violent, abusive, and more often than not drunk since the death of his wife. Although he refuses to surrender the bones for Christian burial, his son smuggles them out to the sisters, whose careful notes about them help a female friend with medical training speculate that the deceased was a malnourished child laborer. Moved by the pitiful tale, the sisters uncover a sensational mix of old and new religions, a ghostly woman in black, a local visionary who knows dark magic, and orphans terrified of a monstrous figure who steals children--and then starts stalking the Bront�s themselves. Ellis takes gothic over the top in the second fictional adventure of her real-life characters.

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September 28, 2020
At the start of Ellis’s atmospheric sequel to 2019’s The Vanished Bride, likewise set in 1845 Yorkshire, Clifton Bradshaw and his grown son, Liston, discover a child’s skeleton in an abandoned chimney of their house on the moors. News of the find reaches Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë, who learn that a medallion with 1832 on it was around the skeleton’s neck—and that 1832 was the year Clifton sealed the room with the chimney. Liston wonders whether his father intended to conceal the bones, and the sisters resolve to try to identify the remains after concluding that they belong to a murder victim. They get help from a friend with medical knowledge, who opines that the child, whose gender or cause of death she can’t ascertain, was malnourished and suffered serious illness. Meanwhile, the Brontës’ housekeeper declares that Clifton was in league with the devil and that the skeleton was evidence of a human sacrifice. As the creepy plot builds toward a satisfying solution, Ellis succeeds in making the sisters plausible investigators. Brontë fans will have a ball. Agent: Hellie Ogden, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

February 1, 2021
The Bront� sisters are planning the publication of a new book of poems when they are summoned to investigate some mysterious bones found buried in the chimney of an old house. It is just before Christmas as the sisters, along with their brother, Branwell, begin the treacherous journey to Top Withens Hall. Clifton Bradshaw and his son, Lifton, live a solitary life there and do not suffer outside interference well. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are determined to learn the identity of the deceased child and give it a proper Christian burial. Their quest takes them all over the moors, where they visit a local witch and a draconian orphanage. Enter Lady Hartley, a socially conscious matron who takes an interest in Charlotte. Charlotte's delight in the attention will lead to danger. Bront� lovers and historical-mystery readers will delight in the author's attention to detail and knowledge of both the Bront� family and local folklore. Readers will probably guess the perpetrator, but the complex motive will surprise them. The intrepid ladies shine in their second case, following The Vanished Bride (2019).

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Starred review from February 1, 2021
It's Christmastime, and the Bront� sisters would rather stay cocooned at home waiting to hear the fate of their poems, lately and nervously submitted for publication, but, as in The Vanished Bride (the 2019 series debut), a mystery is afoot. A child's skeleton has been found hidden in nearby home Top Withens, and Emily, Charlotte, and Anne must investigate. More than in the debut, local superstitions based on pagan ways that remain among the Yorkshire locals take a front seat here. Readers will enjoy the Bront�s' exploration of these old ways even as the women keep to stuffy period norms, at least when others are around. The sleuthing pays off with a satisfying ending that continues Ellis' style of unobtrusively revealing period details as part of a compelling, believable story. The author also succeeds wonderfully in offering a sense of how the Bront�s might have spoken, without making readers work hard. A bonus: Top Withens was a real home that may have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. Readers who enjoy J. Aaron Sanders' Walt Whitman mysteries are an ideal audience for Ellis.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 9, 2020

In Out of Hounds, Brown's latest "Sister Jane Arnold" mystery, the good sister deals with local tensions--and murder--when town newbies threaten her crowd's foxhunting ways. In Chow's Mimi Lee Reads Between the Lines, second in the "Sassy Cat Mysteries," Mimi Lee must rely on her debonair talking cat, Marshmallow, when her sister is accused of murdering a teaching colleague. In Ellis's The Diabolical Bones, which follows up the film-optioned The Vanished Bride, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bront� find their writing interrupted by a new case: bones have been discovered bricked up in a chimney at moldering Scar Top House. Eriksson's The Night of the Fire brings back popular Swedish police inspector Ann Lindell, who's retired to the country but not for long--someone has set fire to the old schoolhouse, now housing asylum seekers, and three people are dead (35,000-copy first printing). Fletcher/Land's Murder, She Wrote: Murder in Season joins the holiday mystery lineup as Jessica Fletcher acknowledges that despite her work on the annual Christmas pageant, she can't ignore two sets of bones (one old, one new) found on her property. Sulari Gentill follows up her LJ-starred, Ned Kelly Award-winning After She Wrote Him with A House Divided, set in 1931 Sydney, Australia, and starring gentleman bohemian Rowland Sinclair, who insinuates himself into a high-stepping (and sometimes conservative) crowd to discover who murdered his beloved Uncle Rowly. Ready to retire, former FBI agent and police consultant Gregor Demarkian takes on his last case in Haddam's One of Our Own, trying to figure out how elderly Marta Warkowski ended up in a coma--and in a big plastic garbage bag--and why her dead super is locked in her apartment (30,000-copy first printing). With The Turning Tide, McPherson, whose Dandy Gilver mysteries have received CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and Historical Macavity Award nominations, gives Dandy the task of figuring out why the local ferrywoman seems to have gone mad--and whether she has committed murder, as she claims. Finally, March's Murder in Old Bombay, winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award, captures Capt. Jim Agnihotri's efforts to find out what really happened when two Parsee women plunge from the university tower in 1892 Bombay (30,000-copy first printing).

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