The Glass of Time: A Novel

Building on his “superb” (Washington Post) debut,?ÿThe Meaning of Night, Michael Cox returns to a murderous nineteenth-century England.

ike its “beguiling” and “intelligent” (New York Times Book Review) predecessor,?ÿThe Glass of Time?ÿis a page-turning period mystery about identity, the nature of secrets, and what happens when past obsessions impose themselves on an unwilling present. In the autumn of 1876, nineteen-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives at the great country house of Evenwood to become a ladys maid to the twenty-sixth Baroness Tansor. But Esperanza is no ordinary servant. She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious Madame de lOrme, to uncover the secrets that her new mistress has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanzas own life is bound up. At Evenwood she meets Lady Tansors two dashing sons, Perseus and Randolph, and finds herself enmeshed in a complicated web of seduction, intrigue, deceit, betrayal, and murder. Few writers are as gifted at evoking the sensibility of the nineteenth century as Michael Cox, who has made the world of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins his own.