Her physician and brother in law, Simon, is quick to assure her that all is fine, but when a second and then third client dies, Agnes fears she may somehow be connected to their deaths. She is shocked when the local Sergeant calls on her to ask questions about a recent sitter who was brutally murdered shortly after their appointment, and worried that notoriety might attach to her business. Set in Bath in 1854, The Shape of Darkness is a atmospheric historical novel from Laura Purcell.Īgnes Darken supports her ailing mother and orphaned nephew with her work as a silhouette artist, but with the growing popularity of the daguerreotypes, she’s finding it harder to attract clients. Status: Read January 2021 courtesy Bloomsbury/Netgalley
Fans of gothic fiction will devour this.Published: February 2nd 2021, Raven Books Purcell convincingly describes the grime and poverty in Bath, an appropriate backdrop to the story’s tragedy and horror. What the two unearth leads to a shocking ending. Pearl’s half-sister, Myrtle, is a mesmerist intent on maximizing profits from her sister’s “gift.” Eventually, the three meet and Agnes forms a pact with Pearl: Agnes will ask Simon to help Pearl’s father (dying horribly from phosphorus poisoning) if Pearl will help her find answers about who is killing her clients and why. Purcell shifts point of view between Agnes and Pearl Meers, a half-starved 11-year-old living in the poorer part of Bath who possesses the ability to channel the dead. Agnes fears the deaths are related and becomes overwhelmed with guilt, believing her “gaze has cast a shadow over them.” Her doctor brother-in-law, Simon Carfax, dismisses her concerns, but more of Agnes’s clients successively wind up dead. Then a client is murdered immediately after sitting for her, and another is found drowned nearby.
With photography rapidly supplanting the art of the silhouette, Agnes Darken is barely making ends meet in Bath, England. A Victorian silhouette artist investigates a mystery with the help of a medium in the suspenseful latest from Purcell ( The House of Whispers).
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