In which we realize there is a lot going on in Boarding houses
The Girl from Greenwich Street by Laura Willig
Stats: 4.5
Thank you to Nethalley for the ARC.
You know that line in “Non-Stop” from Hamilton where Aaron Burr says our client Levi Weeks is not guilty and tells Hamilton to sit down? Well I think Laura Willig must have had an earworm and that line stuck with her because she has turned that trial in early 1800 into an engrossing historical mystery, bringing her engaging writing style and meticulous research to the early years of the American nation.
Elma Sands is our girl of Greenwich Street and, as the story opens in the boarding house of her Quaker cousin, Cathy, she is excited, she is planning her elopement to a man who will shower her with fine clothes and jewels. She never tells anyone who her secret suitor is, so when she is found dead in the Manhattan Well a few weeks after she disappears, the blame for her murder falls on Levi Weeks. Because of the attention that Levi, a boarder in Cathy’s house, had previously shown Elma, suspicion falls on him and he soon finds himself charged with her murder. His brother, Ezra, a wealthy builder, hires Aaron Burr and Brockhurst Livingston to defend Levi. But then Alexander Hamilton decides that he too is going to help, figuring that he should dig a little deeper, to not just get Levi Weeks acquitted but also fully cleared. He knows someone else killed Elma and he feels like he needs to find the real murder.
Willig is excellent at writing a scene that pulls the reader into the historical era of her novels. Her Pink Carnation series is one of my all time favorite historical series and I rank her books along with Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and the Cadfael series as historical mysteries that allow the reader to inhabit another time and place for a short period of time. At its heart, like The Alienist, The Girl From Greenwich Street, is the story of the people on the margins who don’t always make it into the history books and become just footnotes.
This book is coming out in early March and I predict that it will be a must-read of 2025. People are going to pick it up because of Burr and Hamilton but will leave with a real sense of the struggles for women in the early years of American history.
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