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Sarah Brandt was born into a wealthy family in New York. She married a doctor, and even after his death, continues his work among the immigrant women of the Lower East Side. Sarah's sister died in childbirth after 'marrying beneath her station' and following her husband into the tenements. Gregory Van Dyke, a friend of Felix Decker, Sarah's father, dies in an explosion in his office. Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt calls in Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy and assigns the case to him, in response to a phone call from Decker. He arrives at the Van Dyke house and is surprised to see Sarah and her mother already there comforting the family. Sarah gets the address of the eldest son, who is living on the lower east side with a Russian anarchist, from Alberta, the daughter of the dead man, who has stayed in touch with her beloved elder brother, and, with Malloy, travels to his apartment which he is sharing with his Russian lover and her brothers. The girl is pregnant, so she stays with Emma Goldman, who is a midwife and their downstairs neighbor, until Creighton returns. Sarah convinces him to come back uptown with her and Malloy but he escapes down the drainpipe during the night. Thompson does a marvelous job of bringing 1896 New York to life. She even notes, in an epilogue, that Emma Goldman would not have lived in that particular tenement, or even on that street. New York's Lower East Side was a series of ghettos at that time. Each street was taken up by immigrants from the same village in the old country. The poorest stayed with relatives. The family could have lived and worked in the front room and rented out the bedroom to greenhorns. The poverty was unimaginable to those of us who think nothing of spending $10 to go to a movie. Thompson is also very careful to indicate that Malloy thinks his love for Sarah is hidden and can never be spoken of, to Sarah or to anyone else, because of the difference in their status. The relationship of Malloy to his mother and deaf son is touchingly described. Sarah helps Malloy disentangle the threads around the death of Van Dyke, to a surprising ending -- and perhaps a softening of the attitude of the Deckers to his social status. This is the sixth in the Gaslight series.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, May 2004
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