Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres because you get to spend time with characters you admire but never had the chance to experience personally. When done well, an author can bring these famous people to life on the page and allow them to live on through whatever imaginative setting has been created for them.

Heather Redmond is well known for her outstanding Charles Dickens-inspired series, A Dickens of a Crime. Now she brings us DEATH AND THE VISITORS, her second mystery featuring Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Jane “Claire” Clairmont. The year is 1814, and the teenage girls are living and working with their parents and siblings in a home that rests above Mary’s father’s bookshop. William Godwin was a well-known philosopher and was married first to Mary’s mother, author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Unfortunately, the bookshop has seen better days, and the Godwin family is struggling.

"DEATH AND THE VISITORS reads like a wonderful Dickensian tale and is consistently intriguing from start to finish."

Things may be looking up with the influx of foreign diplomats who have been descending upon London recently. A wealthy clan of Russian aristocrats are coming by to pay a visit to the Godwins and plan to make a healthy donation to both the bookshop and the publishing venture, the Juvenile Library, that they have been trying to promote. This gift is allegedly going to come in the form of a bag full of precious diamonds. That should solve all their problems and get nasty creditors like John Cannon off their backs.

However, all their hopes turn to tragedy when Dmitry Naryshkin, who had promised the diamonds, disappears one night and his body turns up not long after, obviously the victim of foul play. Another Russian, a supposed hitman named Alexander Federov, is arrested for the murder. Either way, the Godwin family is out the riches they were anticipating, and Cannon is threatening to get all he is owed or else the family will be out on the streets.

It is at this point that Mary and Jane, who already have proven themselves to be amateur sleuths due to their fertile imaginations, start looking into what soon becomes a small series of murders that they believe must be connected. They will need the aid of a family friend and Mary’s would-be suitor, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Other prominent characters like Lord Byron appear in the story as well, which made me think of the now infamous evening at Byron’s castle when Mary, Jane, Percy, Byron and Dr. Polidori all competed to create literary works, and FRANKENSTEIN was one of the results. If you have ever seen the gloriously delirious Ken Russell film Gothic, you will get a nice interpretation of how that evening may have gone.

Mary and Jane have much more than just creditors and Russian assassins to avoid in their investigation. The influx of foreigners has brought about many abductions, specifically of young women, and Mary is almost a victim at one point. When a conspiracy is eventually uncovered, the danger really intensifies for our young protagonists. Merely saving their family home and bookshop may be the least of their worries.

DEATH AND THE VISITORS reads like a wonderful Dickensian tale and is consistently intriguing from start to finish.