Whitechapel in the 1880s, a tea porter’s daughter, and a rise from the London docks to the New York tea trade, with a murder plot and the Ripper era running underneath.
It is a long Victorian doorstop in the deliberate sense, built for immersion rather than economy. Every reversal is signposted well in advance and arrives anyway.
The dock and warehouse detail is the part that stayed with me. The commercial machinery of the tea trade is researched far more carefully than the romance plot sitting on top of it.
Read February 2021.
