The Whitechapel Full Moon Society by Elizabeth DeLozier: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

The Whitechapel Full Moon Society by Elizabeth DeLozier

The Whitechapel Full Moon Society is set in Victorian London. It’s 1888. Caroline Foster has lost her aristocratic father and with him everything she had, as he’d been in deep debt. Out of options, she heads to London to find her brother Charlie, whose existence is a secret only she and her (former) maid know. But when she arrives at the boarding house in Whitechapel where he lives, she learns he’s disappeared months ago. Out of options and funds, she takes a position as a maid in the boarding house. She’s not really suited for the job, as she’s sickly and has never worked before, but she adapts fast.

Outwardly, it’s a very good place where guests are well fed and looked after. The boarders are a collection of mostly foreigners or people who have physical differences of some kind, but apart from raising Caroline's suspicions, it’s just surface level diversity. Nothing is made of it. But there are some odd rules, the most important of which is that Caroline isn’t to go to a locked room in the east wing, and she has to lock herself in her room during the full moon night. For the first half of the book, she obeys.

Outside the boarding house in Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper is spreading terror among the residents. It doesn’t take long for Caroline to start to believe that the locked room and the killer are somehow connected.

This was a fairly good read. It was well-written and managed to convey historical setting and Caroline’s new life in fairly short scenes without getting bogged down with too many details. The plot is fairly compact and small. There are two mysteries: what happened to Charlie and what’s going on behind the locked door. First mystery is more interesting to reader, and one that I didn’t easily guess, but Caroline doesn’t really do any meaningful investigation and in the end the truth is simply revealed to her.

The second mystery is more mysterious to Caroline than it is to reader, as the name of the book pretty much reveals it. The pacing is slightly off concerning it. The first full moon doesn’t happen until about midpoint and nothing happens. All in all, nothing happens until the latter half of the book and then only at the very end. Maybe it’s my fault for reading this as a mystery, and expecting an investigation plot.

Then there is the Jack the Ripper storyline that is woven into Caroline’s mysteries. I thought the story would’ve worked fine without that connection. Surely there’s room for more than one serial killer in Victorian London, especially since the author took liberties with reality and historical facts already. In the end, everything wrapped up nicely and neatly without much effort on Caroline’s part. I especially liked the acceptance Caroline showed and received when the truth finally came out, and that true monsters were elsewhere.

Caroline was an ok lead, but her inner life, memories of Charlie and her writing took much of the narrative instead of her forwarding the plot. Even so, her inner life would’ve had more meaning if it had foreshadowed the truth about her in any meaningful way. Now it was a bit of deus ex machina at the moment it was needed and not a moment earlier. All in all, this wasn’t a memorable read, but it was a good way to spend a few hours.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.