As we discover who might have suffocated Dolly Shaw, a capricious, demanding drunkard, Jennings explores the permutations and stratifications of society in Toronto at the close of the century. “Maureen Jennings sets up this 19th-century tale of blackmail and murder rather like a jigsaw puzzle: each chapter introduces new clues, new characters, and new points of view until the complete picture is revealed. Despite certain plot transparencies, the grim story is told in forthright detail and put in a social context that elicits real sympathy for characters bound by class and biology.” When Dolly Merishaw, an unsavory specimen of the profession, is smothered on her own hearth, the police dispatch William Murdoch to determine which of Dolly’s shameful deeds drove one of her clients to murder. Even the high and mighty were plagued by syphilis, birth defects and loathsome skin conditions, and the lower classes were also malnourished and crawling with worms, while any woman, rich or poor, who needed an abortion or had to give up a child for adoption was at the mercy of her midwife. “Life in Toronto in 1895 was no glide across the ice, according to Maureen Jennings in her horridly graphic period mystery UNDER THE DRAGON’S TAIL (Thomas Dunne/St. Now, Murdoch isn’t sure if he’s hunting one murderer – or two. What is a shock, though, is that a week later a young boy is found dead in Dolly’s squalid kitchen. So it comes as no surprise to Detective William Murdoch when this malicious woman is murdered. Dolly Merishaw is a midwife and an abortionist in Victorian Toronto, but although she keeps quiet about her clients’ condition, her contempt for them and her greed leaves every one of them resentful and angry. Women rich and poor come to her, desperate and in dire need of help – and discretion.
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