Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol
Oscar Wilde Mystery: 6
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4.4 • 15 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In OSCAR WILDE AND THE MURDERS AT READING GAOL, the sixth in Gyles Brandreth's acclaimed Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries series featuring Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, Reading Gaol's most famous prisoner is pitted against a ruthless and fiendishly clever serial killer. 'Intelligent, amusing and entertaining' Alexander McCall Smith It is 1897, Dieppe. Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, novelist, raconteur and ex-convict, has fled the country after his release from Reading Gaol. Tonight he is sharing a drink and the story of his cruel imprisonment with a mysterious stranger. He has endured a harsh regime: the treadmill, solitary confinement, censored letters, no writing materials. Yet even in the midst of such deprivation, Oscar's astonishing detective powers remain undiminished - and when first a brutal warder and then the prison chaplain are found murdered, who else should the governor turn to for help other than Reading Gaol's most celebrated inmate?
In this, the latest novel in his acclaimed Oscar Wilde murder mystery series, Gyles Brandreth takes us deep into the dark heart of Wilde's cruel incarceration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After two subpar outings (most recently 2012's Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders), Brandreth returns to form with his outstanding sixth Victorian whodunit, making the most of a difficult but intriguing premise. What if Oscar Wilde, while held between 1895 and 1897 in Reading Gaol, used his superior intellect to try to solve multiple murders at the prison? Earlier, at Wandsworth in London, an especially cruel warder dropped dead of uncertain causes in Wilde's cell just before the disgraced playwright and wit was to be transferred. To Wilde's shock, another warder dies at his new prison, the first of several mysterious deaths there. Brandreth smoothly integrates details of Wilde's tormented existence behind bars and the sadism of the British penal system at the time into a complex mystery plot that only the most attentive reader will resolve correctly in advance of the denouement.
