Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge

Long plane rides are for scarfing down anticipated reads

I rated Lizzie Pook’s debut, Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter a well-deserved five stars, so I salivated over her new release, Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge until Netgalley pitied me and gave me an advanced reader copy. I had a long plane journey in a window seat, so I saved this book to help get me through the experience of being penned in for 12 hours. Pook got me through it — I finished the book with several hours left to go!

Maude Horton opens the story by witnessing a hanging — but whose? The hanging is the future and we find that the start of the narrative is Maude’s sister, Constance’s, mysterious death aboard the Makepeace in the Arctic and the beginning of Maude’s revenge arc. She has her suspicions and embarks on an execution tourism excursion, organized by the creep in her crosshairs. Her clever game is at constant risk of being exposed and the stakes are high — if this creep killed her sister, he might kill her too.

A further complication: Maude’s sister was never meant to be on that ship in the first place. The [fictional] Makepeace set sail in 1849 with strictly no women allowed. If found out, this could have endangered Constance’s life during the Arctic expedition and makes Maude’s investigation more complicated, secretive, difficult, and dangerous. Despite the high likelihood of foul play, Maude cannot go to the Admiralty. As she probes deeper, she finds that maybe the Admiralty is already involved.

This book contains grisly descriptions of public executions, assault, and murder. It is a fascinating fictionalization of the historical intersection of the “murder mania” of execution tourism and merch collection and the fascination of the Victorian public on the lost Arctic expedition of John Franklin and the numerous [failed] recovery missions that followed. Lizzie Pook’s writing gives me the same rush I get from my other favorite atmospheric and mysterious historical fiction authors Stacey Halls and Elizabeth MacNeal. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I am a sucker for Early Modern (and Victorian) creep narratives. I can’t wait for Pook’s next book!