{"id":6355,"date":"2025-04-11T05:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6355"},"modified":"2025-04-11T05:11:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T12:11:00","slug":"will-thomas-season-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/will-thomas-season-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Thomas: Season of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barker & Llewelyn #16<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Season of Death<\/em> is the sixteenth book in Will Thomas’ series set in Victorian London, featuring private enquiry agents (they prefer this term, rather than “detectives”) Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn.\u00a0 I had not read any of the previous books in the series before, and at first I wondered if I’d be lost, starting the series with the sixteenth book, but this novel was so engaging that I felt drawn in by the story and the characters right away, and now I want to go back and read the others.\u00a0 Thomas gives the reader enough detail about the characters and their previous cases that you don’t feel lost, but not so much as to spoil the earlier books.<\/p>\n

Cyrus Barker is a Scotsman who has led a very adventurous life, from what I can tell.\u00a0 He has spent a considerable amount of time in China, and still has connections among the Chinese community in London.\u00a0 He is an expert in martial arts, which I assume he has learned in China.\u00a0 Barker has also been a sea captain.\u00a0 He has a formidable intellect and uses deductive reasoning.\u00a0 Like Sherlock Holmes, he can tell everything about a person from little details.\u00a0 He even smokes a pipe.\u00a0 Unlike Holmes (at least in Conan Doyle’s originals), Barker has a long-term relationship with a woman, an upper-class lady named Philippa, who doesn’t actually appear in person in this book, even though she’s talked about.\u00a0 I would like to know more about their relationship, and I assume it’s covered in the earlier books.<\/p>\n

The narrator, Thomas Llewelyn, is the son of a Welsh coal miner.\u00a0 He was educated at Oxford, but then he was wrongly convicted of theft and has spent some time in prison before becoming Barker’s assistant, then his junior partner.\u00a0 I gather that, at the beginning of the series, he was quite a young man.\u00a0 Now he is in his early thirties, and married to a Jewish woman, with an infant daughter.\u00a0 His wife, Rebecca, is a very sympathetic character, and I would love to read about how they first met.\u00a0 This book does not include much about Victorian London’s Jewish community, but I take it that some of the earlier books do.\u00a0 Unlike Barker, who is very serious and a man of few words, Llewelyn is witty, with a sarcastic sense of humor.\u00a0 They are a perfect contrast to each other, and make an excellent team.<\/p>\n

This book takes place in November 1895.\u00a0 A gang of thieves known as the Dawn Gang has been robbing businesses in London’s East End, and Barker and Llewelyn are on their trail.\u00a0 A beggar woman known only as “Dutch” tips them off about where to find the gang.\u00a0 They capture the thieves at a jewelry store and find the jeweler has been murdered.\u00a0 The police take the gang members off to prison, but the next day, the thieves are all found dead in their prison cell.\u00a0 They have killed themselves rather than go to trial.<\/p>\n

Barker and Llewelyn go to inform the families of the dead men, but they find that all the family members have disappeared, and only a dog is left.\u00a0 Llewelyn takes the dog home, and I guessed right away that his baby would love the dog, and that he and his family would keep it.\u00a0 Barker realizes that the thieves’ families have not gone willingly, and they are being held somewhere.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Barker and Llewelyn take Dutch, the beggar woman, to a shelter for abused women, but she refuses to tell them any more.\u00a0 Barker notices that she is much better educated than most beggars, but before he can find anything out about her background, the shelter is raided by people who are after Dutch, and no one else.\u00a0 The shelter, incidentally, is run by two female lawyers, who are very interesting characters in themselves.<\/p>\n

Then an abandoned railway tunnel, which has become the headquarters of London’s criminal gang leaders, collapses while the criminals are meeting, killing all of them.\u00a0 The collapse appears to be an accident, but of course it isn’t, and Barker realizes right away that someone bombed the tunnel in order to ignite a war among the remaining gang members, who are vying for leadership.<\/p>\n

While all this is going on, an aristocratic politician, Lord Danvers, and his American-born wife, approach Barker and Llewelyn and hire them to find Lady Danvers’ missing sister, the heiress May Evans.\u00a0 May had a suitor Lord Danvers didn’t approve of, and he thinks the couple has gone off to Rome together.\u00a0 Barker has his doubts, though, and he finds that the suitor is still in London, but hasn’t seen May for several months.\u00a0 The young man thinks she might have committed suicide.\u00a0 Or has she been killed?\u00a0 Or is she still alive, not wanting anyone to find her?<\/p>\n

These seemingly unconnected plot threads–the beggar woman, the criminal underworld, and the missing heiress–all turn out to be related, but of course it would be a spoiler to say how.\u00a0 The plot is very cleverly put together, and it’s like figuring out a puzzle to see how the various storylines fit.\u00a0 There is also plenty of action as Barker and Llewelyn are pursued throughout London by the villains, and the events include a fire and the theft of Llewelyn’s beloved horse (who, thankfully, is found again), and at one point the protagonists are thrown into the Thames.<\/p>\n

Barker and Llewelyn have an antagonistic relationship with the police, or at least certain members of the police, who are corrupt and let the villains go, while they send Barker and Llewelyn to jail.\u00a0 Luckily, once again, they escape.\u00a0 Barker, though, is a friend of the commissioner of police, and they are in a secret society together.\u00a0 There is also an inspector named Poole, with whom they seem to have a good working relationship, even though Poole has gotten credit before, when Barker and Llewelyn have captured the criminals.<\/p>\n

Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn are great characters, with whom I would like to spend more time.\u00a0 I’m glad I have fifteen other books still to read in the series.\u00a0 I also enjoyed many of the secondary characters and would like to get to know them better.\u00a0 I have already mentioned Barker’s long-time love interest and Llewelyn’s wife.\u00a0 There is also a female enquiry agent named Sarah Fletcher who is a very interesting character.\u00a0 She is learning martial arts from Barker and is a friend of Llewelyn’s wife Rebecca, but she dislikes Llewelyn.\u00a0 I don’t really know why, and I am sure there is a story there, which is probably explained in the earlier books.<\/p>\n

I highly recommend this book for fans of Sherlock Holmes.\u00a0 The relationship between Barker and Llewelyn definitely recalls Holmes and Watson, but there is enough of a difference that they are very much their own characters, not clones of the earlier ones.\u00a0 Fans of Anne Perry’s Pitt books should also enjoy this series.\u00a0 The secret society working behind the scenes reminds me of Perry’s “Inner Circle.”\u00a0 In this case, though, the secret society is not all bad, because Barker and the commissioner of police are members.\u00a0 Also, I think fans of C.S. Harris’ Sebastian St. Cyr books would like this series, even though Harris’ books are set in the Regency period.\u00a0 Both series feature an enigmatic hero, who seems to have superpowers at times, and both explore the criminal underworld of London, as well as the upper classes.\u00a0 I am glad to have discovered this series, and am looking forward to reading more of it.\u00a0— Vicki Kondelik<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barker & Llewelyn #16 Season of Death is the sixteenth book in Will Thomas’ series set in Victorian London, featuring private enquiry agents (they prefer this term, rather than “detectives”) Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn.\u00a0 I had not read any of the previous books in the series before, and at first I wondered if I’d … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2062,2061,10,100,450,273,2060],"class_list":["post-6355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1895-london","tag-barker-and-llewelyn","tag-historical","tag-minotaur-books","tag-sherlock-holmes","tag-vicki-kondelik","tag-will-thomas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6357,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6355\/revisions\/6357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}