Poor Tom Is Cold

In this third adventure featuring William Murdoch, the amiable detective becomes involved with the apparent suicide of a young colleague. Constable Oliver Wicken, the sole support of his mother and invalid sister, seems to have shot himself in the temple with his own revolver.

Murdoch’s investigation, which is driven as much by the desire of the police to avoid the stigma of a suicide in its ranks as it is by a desire to expose a crime, takes him far afield, but his suspicions begin to settle on the viperous family that lived next door to Wicken. And when the young Mrs. Eakin, the third wife of the elderly neighbour, is committed to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, Murdoch’s doubts deepen. Is she indeed insane as the family says she is, or has she been deliberately driven to the brink of insanity?

 

“In this rather chilling mystery, Jennings makes us forget we’re reading something set more than a century ago; she evokes the past so vividly it almost instantly feels like the present.”

–Booklist

“Jennings has a wonderful feel for the places and tasks that give life and context to a character.”

–New York Times Book Review

“Readers are given a vivid, heart-wrenching picture of the poverty of many in Victorian Toronto.”

–Publishers Weekly

ISBN:0-7710-4395-3

Can. $8.99