The Alienist

A doctor probes the mind of Grace Marks, convicted in a notorious Canadian murder case.

Two women in Gold Rush Monterey investigate murders (SAH Prize 2023).

In 1862 London, pickpocket Sue Trinder is planted as a maid in a lonely Thames-side mansion to help a gentleman swindle an heiress—then the con turns inside out. Sarah Waters’s Booker-shortlisted Victorian novel is literary historical fiction of thieves, asylums, and desire, with crime-plot machinery that still startles.

In 1970 advertising artist Si Morley joins a secret project that reaches the past by self-hypnosis, and from a room in the Dakota he steps into the New York winter of 1882 to trace the half-burned letter Kate cannot explain. Jack Finney’s 1970 novel is Victorian time-slip historical fiction of gaslight Manhattan, the mystery attached to that letter, and a man who falls in love with Julia on the wrong side of a century.

In 1889 Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead by the yew alley at Baskerville Hall, and the prints nearby are said to be a gigantic hound’s, from a curse on his house. Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 novel is Victorian mystery historical fiction of the case Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson take for the new heir, Sir Henry—Dartmoor, the Grimpen Mire, and a legend that does not account for every light on the moor.

On a moonlit London road, drawing-master Walter Hartright meets a woman dressed all in white—then, engaged at Limmeridge, he is pulled into the plot that binds Laura Fairlie to Sir Percival Glyde and the charming, dangerous Count Fosco. Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel is Victorian historical mystery of swapped identities, a private asylum, and the question of who the woman in white really is.