[Review] Kate Griffin: 'Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders'

Sometimes the journey is more interesting than the destination. Well, that might be true for Kate Griffin's 'Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders'.

One fateful day, the story goes, when Griffin commuted home, she collected a copy of a magazine. It mentioned a crime fiction competition, which requested entrants to submit 6,000 words of crime fiction featuring a female protagonist. She read it, shoved the magazine away and forgot about it. Later that year, Griffin found the magazine again, started to write, entered the competition, and won. Then she had to write the entire book in a few short months.

[Buy the book here]

Set in 1880, dancing girls are going missing from 'Paradise', the abode of Lady Ginger. Kitty Peck, a 17 (or 18) year old seamstress, is tasked by Lady Ginger to discover what happened to these missing girls. A monster seems to hide in the shadows.

'Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders' is set in a music hall in Victorian London. Kate Griffin might have won a competition, but her book faces stiff competition from more established writers, such as E.S. Thomson and her protagonist and apothecary Jem Flockhart.

I'm not sure 'Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders' is good enough. More than 60 pages into the story and there's an almost total absence of crime, thrills, and chills. It gets somewhat better from then on, but the story doesn't rise to the occasion. The story has neither depth nor atmosphere, while the writing itself is rather bland. I was starting to wonder if the book should be called a young adult thriller or perhaps a thriller that was written by a young adult.

What was obvious, however, that Kate Griffin knows about the history of Britain in Victorian times. She does write about the grime, depravity, and the poverty of those trying times, but  what's missing from the pages is a sense of crime.

Crime fiction without crime is just fiction.

Buy the book here.