A struggling silhouette artist in Victorian Bath seeks out a renowned child spirit medium in order to speak to the dead - and to try and identify their killers.
A wonderfully tangled Gothic tale. It features Agnes, a silhouette cutter with a troubled past; Pearl, an albino child medium; and a serial killer on the loose. We encounter early experiments with photography, Victorian medicine, and Mesmerism. The city itself is a character: dank and decaying, often musty ... I enjoyed the descriptive prose of The Shape of Darkness , and the story was full of mystery and intrigue. A satisfying and compulsive read.
A Victorian silhouette artist investigates a mystery with the help of a medium in the suspenseful latest ... Purcell convincingly describes the grime and poverty in Bath, an appropriate backdrop to the story’s tragedy and horror. Fans of gothic fiction will devour this.
