This series is getting better and better. Here in Murder in Little Italy, we have a very young Irish girl giving birth to the child of her also very young husband, an very young man of Italian descent who works in his family’s restaurant.  He has 3 bothers and a couple of sisters who also work there. Sarah is involved to help deliver the new baby.  Arguments follow and the next day Sarah is called back to the house because the mother of the newborn is dead,  apparently murdered.   And then thanks to some yellow journalism, there’s a riot and another murder.    

Murder in Little Italy
By Victoria Thompson 
2006 / 
Read by Callie Beaulieu  7h 15m
Rating A+ / historical/procedural
#8 in Gaslight Murders

There’s a lot involved here – peripherally of course, there’s New York’s Italian mob known as the Black Hand which had a protection racket going .  And there’s the older bunch known as Tammany Hall who have their own gangste-corruption games going. . 

But the “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt (yes, later 26th president of the US) is now the Police Commissioner and has hired a woman (gasp) as his assistant/secretary. And TR is a real speaking character in this book.

This reminded me of Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow back in 1975 in which Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had a fictional little meet-up in the Coney Island Tunnel of Love with E.L. Doctorow setting a “new” standard for historical fiction — personally, I loved it!  And Thompson is trying on those shoes. That kind of thing bothered me for awhile but I got okay with it back then and it’s okay here. The controversy is if an historical character can be a fictional one in a novel, saying things there is no record of him ever saying in real life.  ??? –   I was horrified and then got over it.  Sometimes it works for an author and a book and sometimes it doesn’t, and it works to an extent in the Gaslight Mysteries –  so long as Thompson doesn’t push it too far. – end of commentary).

This genre is historical FICTION so the author does what she wants to do and if it works,  kudos. This can make for some darned fine historical fiction or some pure stupidity. The Gaslight series is fine.  Ragtime takes place between 1902 and 1912 and that’s superb.

This time in Gaslight Mysteries #8, Sarah Brandt who is upper class by birth but now a doctor’s young widow joins forces (again) with Detective Frank Malloy (per Police Commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt’s instructions) to resolve the murder of the young Irish girl who was killed the night after she gave birth in her new husband’s family home.  There are a lot of suspects and the plot gets twisty. I really should have kept notes about who was related to whom in what way.  

 I’ll be on to #9,  Murder in Chinatown, in fairly short order – later this month or early April.