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Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye5/29/2023 ![]() Valentine, a stalwart of the city’s Democratic political machine, gets him the job, but tensions seethe between the brothers that seem to involve more than Valentine’s addiction to morphine. It’s the second time fire has upended his life an earlier blaze orphaned Timothy and older brother Valentine when they were children, leaving them to fend for themselves on the city’s brutal, indifferent streets like so many other “kinchin.” (Faye makes savory use of 19th-century thieves’ slang throughout.) Timothy reluctantly becomes a “copper star,” so-called for the badge worn by members of New York’s newly created police force. But the conflagration that sweeps through Manhattan that night consumes Timothy’s savings and disfigures his face. ![]() ![]() In July 1845, Timothy Wilde is a successful bartender who’s accumulated $400 in silver-just about enough, he figures, to ask minister’s daughter Mercy Underhill to marry him. This time around, she’s invented her own plot. ![]() Displaying the same gift for characterization that refreshed her retelling of the Jack the Ripper case ( Dust and Shadow, 2009), Faye crafts a top-notch historical thriller. ![]()
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