Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman

Reader: Anton Lesser

Warning! If you have not yet read The Shadow in the North, stop reading this review. There’s no way to review this book without giving spoilers for the previous book in the series.

Short Review: The third Sally Lockhart mystery continues Pullman’s engrossing story of a young Victorian woman, expertly read by Anton Lesser. This book delves further into questions of women’s and children’s rights in Victorian Britain and also examines worker’s and immigrant’s rights and antisemitism.

Long Review: This book opens three years after the last closes, and we find that Sally is now a mother to Fred’s child and grieving his death. Jim and Webster are out of the country, and Sally is living at a country house and still running her financial advisory business, now with the aid of a partner and a house staff. Sally is visited by a process server who serves her with divorce papers for a marriage she never engaged in, and as happens in this series, all hell breaks loose. This entire series is full of intrigue and danger, but I found this one the most frightening because the threat is against Sally, but also against her daughter Harriet, and Sally has so few people to help her and so few tools to aid her. It’s truly terrifying.

I found Pullman’s inclusion of the London Jewish community in the story incredibly interesting. I’m no expert on Jewish history, and the book made me want to study more. I love it when that happens. I am more familiar with British women’s history, particularly the history of Suffragists and other early women’s rights activists, so I found that aspect both comfortably familiar and very interesting.

Anton Lesser reads this book as fantastically as he read the two prior books in the series. The sense of desperation and drama tightens as the book progresses. He does a great job with the broadened array of accents and characters in this book. I cannot wait to listen to more books read by Lesser.

This book has been criticized for being overly political and for containing content that is inappropriate for young readers, as were the earlier books in the series. In this novel, I agree that Pullman puts too much emphasis on the political, which slows the book down a bit. I don’t think the book contains anything inappropriate for young adults though, particularly in light of the standard fare for teens available on TV and the web. For me, Pullman’s writing and Lesser’s reading are enough to bolster the weaker parts of the book.

A Sally Lockhart Mystery: The Shadow in the North

Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman

Reader: Anton Lesser

Short Review: The slightly-less brilliant sequel to The Ruby in the Smoke, read just as brilliantly by Anton Lesser.

Long Review: In the six intervening years between the first book in the series and this sequel, Sally has opened a financial consultancy business and Jim and Frederick have become private investigators. This books opens as a ship vanishes in the Baltic. Soon after, Sally becomes interested in the ship’s destruction when she learns that one of her clients lost a great deal of money she had invested in the shipping company whose ship went down. Sally begins investigating the shipping company in the hopes of returning her client’s money to her, while Jim and Frederick are asked to provide protection to a magician who claims to have knowledge of a murder. All hell breaks loose, of course.

I enjoyed this book, but I also saw some weaknesses in it. There are a couple of plot points that are a bit hard to swallow, but I don’t tend to focus much on that as long as they don’t apply to something I study personally. More importantly, Pullman definitely brings a political mindset to his work, and I can see how someone whose political views differed from the author’s would find that annoying. In the first novel of the series, Pullman criticizes colonialism, the opium wars and trade, and Victorian limits on women’s rights. I doubt many readers see his platforms as controversial. In this book, however, Pullman is examining the excesses of corporations and the growth of the military-industrial complex. I don’t find fault with his criticisms, but I’m much farther to the left than most Americans, so I also don’t see myself as representative on this subject.

The book also begins exploring Victorian sexual mores and it has a number of violent scenes. I’ve read a number of criticisms of this book based on the fact that a “young adult” novel depicts sexual relationships and/or violence. Here, I think the problem is really how publishers classify novels, not the content itself. Sally was 16 in the first book. She is 22 in this sequel, and no longer a minor by today’s definition. But some parents really don’t want their kids reading books that contain sex or violence, so they should how mature their young readers are before handing this audiobook over. I think that audiobooks can make certain things, including sex and violence, seem more intense than they would seem on the printed page. Lesser’s astounding skill as a reader intensifies such material even further, so the violence seems sharper and the sexiness sexier. I was fine with it, but I’m and adult and my Mom hasn’t monitored my choice in books since I was 10.

The Ruby in the Smoke

Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman
Reader: Anton Lesser

Short Review: A beautifully read story about a resourceful young woman who finds herself orphaned and embroiled in a deadly mystery.

Long Review: This first novel of a series is set in Victorian England, one of my favorite settings, and it follows a head-strong, resourceful young woman, my favorite sort of character. I’m a fan of Pullman’s, and I was bound to like this book. What surprised me though was how much I love the narrator. Lesser does an amazing job as reader. I know I have an obvious predilection for English readers, but Lesser is uncommonly good. He switches from character to character and accent to accent smoothly and believably. He alters his pitch and tone for different characters, but his voices for women aren’t those ludicrous falsettos that would bounce you out of the story. His natural pitch is in the tenor range, so he drops for men’s voices rather than climbing too much for women’s. It may not make much of a difference for some listeners, but for me his technique made the audiobook. In addition to his excellent accent and pitch work, his pacing and acting are wonderful throughout. The book was absolutely engrossing. I didn’t want it to end.

The book opens as Sally Lockhart goes to the office of her recently-deceased father, a shipping agent, to inquire about a note she received from his former business partner. Her brief conversation with an office worker named Jim lays the foundation for their friendship. Her conversation with her father’s Secretary Higgs leaves him dead on the floor. As the story progresses, questions about colonization, the opium trade, women’s rights, family, friendship, and betrayal all loom around Sally. As she delves into the mystery hinted at by the note, Sally reveals herself to be an uncommon young woman, and I loved rooting for her and the allies she draws to her side. This is a great start to an entertaining series.