Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
Mannequin House
Unavailable
Mannequin House
Unavailable
Mannequin House
Ebook350 pages5 hours

Mannequin House

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this ebook

London, 1914. Called out to investigate the murder of a fashion model employed by the House of Blackley, a prestigious Kensington department store, Detective Inspector Silas Quinn of Scotland Yard’s Special Crimes Department is thrown into the bizarre: the chief murder suspect is a monkey. He may be sceptical, but how will Quinn ever get to the truth when faced with the maelstrom of seething jealousy, resentment, forbidden desires and thwarted passion that is the Mannequin House?
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 1, 2013
ISBN9781780103877
Unavailable
Mannequin House
Author

R. N. Morris

R.N. Morris is the author of five previous Silas Quinn mysteries as well as the acclaimed St Petersburg historical crime series featuring detective Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He lives in north London with his wife and two children.

Read more from R. N. Morris

Related to Mannequin House

Related ebooks

Historical Mystery For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Mannequin House

Rating: 3.3333333333333335 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

3 ratings1 review

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Where I got the book: review copy from the Historical Novel Society. This review first appeared on the HNS website.This murder mystery is set in 1914, but the historical setting is not a strong element in its pages. It reads like Golden Age detective fiction in terms of its style and the deft handling of the omniscient viewpoint with frequent shifts into the detective’s psyche. The detective, Silas Quinn, is internally tormented and under a cloud due to the high body count of recent investigations, and early in the novel the action seems almost unbearably suspended as Quinn overanalyzes minor points, including the fact that the officer technically in charge of the case wears an identical overcoat to his own.Just at the moment where it seems the author’s gift for vivid, highly figurative description is being allowed to run wild to the detriment of the story, the locked-room plot resolves itself into an intense psychological mosaic. The plot itself—the murder of a young woman who works as a mannequin in the department store owned by Benjamin Blackley, a crowd-pleaser with a domineering, sadistic side—is relatively straightforward, but the way in which the unraveling of the mystery affects Quinn is fascinating. Murder mysteries tend to deal with the darker emotions, but in The Mannequin House it is the detective, the representative of justice, who seems to stand squarely within their shadow, to the bemusement of his colleagues.R.N. Morris’s elegant writing style does much to sustain the reader’s interest, but where he falls down, perhaps, is in attempting humorous touches, especially with quirky, dialect-ridden minor characters. But then the same could be said of other Golden Age writers. When we look through Quinn’s eyes the prose is flawless. An uneven but compelling read.