The Last Dickens: A Novel by Mattew Pearl

I loved Pearl's book, and if you're a Dickens lover like I am, you will too!

Title Detail: "Full-Text Reviews
Booklist (January 1, 2009 (Vol. 105, No. 9))
Pearl’s latest literary historical mystery aligns perfectly with his two previous works, the widely applauded Dante Club (2002) and the equally esteemed Poe Shadow (2006); like its predecessors, the novel is a brilliant, exciting thriller exactingly set in past times and involving mysterious aspects of the lives of famous writers. This compelling yarn opens with a—yes, mysterious—scene set in 1870 India, in the wilds, when a mounted policeman invokes the name of Dickens while chasing a robber. Zoom off to Boston on the same day, when a clerk at a publishing house, who was sent to take into his own hands, for his boss, the advance sheets of the next installment of the recently deceased Charles Dickens’ novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is run down by an omnibus on his way back to the office, and the pages go missing. This situation necessitates the publisher’s going to England to attempt to ascertain how Dickens intended to end his novel. Just what do the seemingly disparate parts of the story have to do with one another? What the publisher becomes embroiled in, in London, is far more complicated than simply manuscript detection. A whole world of life-and-death nefariousness awaits both him and the reader, who will be well rewarded."