Jacket Description:
Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await the arrival of Dickens’s unfinished novel. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that he hopes will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.
Danger and intrigue abound on the journey to England, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel’s older sister, to assist him. As they attempt to uncover Dickens’s final mystery, Osgood and Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of Dickens’s inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens’s lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind.
Reading Room Short Review:
The Last Dickens is a mystery that revolves around the last half of Charles Dickens' last book, The Mystery of Edward Drood. Dickens died of a stroke at age 58 having only submitted the first half of his last book for serial publication. Matthew Pearl creates a mystery of his own, with good vs. evil forces in pursuit of the missing last half of Edwin Drood. The facts about and insights into Dickens as an author and a person are interspersed into Pearl's novel with a marvelous even handedness. The world of publishing in the late 1800's, especially in America, adds to the intrigue and interest of this fascinating novel. The Last Dickens may well be Matthew Pearl's best to date of his literary fiction offerings
