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The second in a brilliant new series, this book follows Marshall Webb. a free lance magazine writer as well as a secret pulp fiction author, and Rebecca Davis, scion of a wealthy family who has made Colden House, a refuge for poor homeless women, her life work, both living in New York City in 1893. Webb is working on a series which will expose Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controls New York City. He will expose, and the reader will learn, some of the reprehensible means the machine used to win elections, including using the insane to vote. The Depression of 1893 is beginning and Colden House is shorter of money than ever before. In this Gilded Age of robber barons and corrupt politicians, Rebecca’s father and brother-in-law are among the wealthy and powerful citizens of the city. Neither will give her any help, so she invests the tiny sum she has with a banker who works for her brother-in-law, only to see him commit suicide without ever providing her with the shares of stock she supposedly bought. While Rebecca searches for other sources of money, Webb, who is in love with her, tries to find out what happened to her money and to the banker. The sense of place is excellent. The reader will get a real feel for New York City just before the turn of the century. Soos especially highlights the plight of women, even wealthy women, who have no power and are assumed, by their male relatives, to be incapable of understanding the simplest facts about economics. The poor women, of course, are even worse off as they are physically abused and forced to subsist somehow often on the streets. It was a harsh time and since the prevailing philosophy was Social Darwinism, which assured the rich that people were poor because they deserved to be, there was nothing to be done about the penurious people. The characters, especially Marshall and Rebecca, are well drawn and empathetic. The reader feels outrage for what Rebecca has to deal with even from her father who should have known better. Her pompous and arrogant brother-in-law is symbolic of all those wealthy people who were satisfied that they were on the highest rung of evolution. You will also meet a motley collection of Tammany workers and others who tried to fight the corruption but failed. The story is engrossing and the reader will learn a great deal about how the rich got rich. It is a tale of deceit and theft and dishonesty. It is hard to identify a single villain, since most of the rich are guilty of the same practices. But the twists and turns of plot will keep the reader involved. I felt the ending, however, was a bit anticlimactic and seemed rather hurriedly put together. That is my only criticism of this book. You will get both enjoyment and knowledge from this mystery. The title, by the way, is both a takeoff on the name given to the times, the Gilded Age, and a description of the roles that the wives of wealthy men must play.
Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, November 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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