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Nell Sweeney is an Irish immigrant with a dark past, but with great good luck she is now working as a governess for the wealthy Hewitt family, taking care of their ward, a child rumored to be the product of a romance between the son of the family and a hired girl. Nell herself hides the fact that she is already married to a man who is doing 30 years in prison. She does it in order to keep her good reputation and to permit the rest of society to think that she and the family's younger son, Dr Will Hewitt, the brilliant surgeon and expert in the new fields of forensics, are engaged so there will be no gossip if they are seen together. Though both Nell and Will are deeply in love, they have vowed to not become more to each other because Nell is a good Catholic and won't think of divorcing her convict husband. Though Will does his best to try to convert Nell to Protestantism in order to marry him, he tries to respect her wishes and so he holds himself at arm's length away from her. When Nell finds out that her favorite honest cop, Colin Cook, is being accused of murdering the pimp of a working girl who is said to have been Cook's mistress, Nell refuses to believe it. When the rest of the Hewitt household leaves to go to Cape Cod for the summer months, she remains in Boston to do some detective work on her own. That is until Will suddenly returns home from his travels and he joins her, going undercover, to discover the real killer. MURDER IN THE NORTH END is not much of a mystery and more of a romance. Nell and Will, both gorgeous, brilliant, talented and loyal to a fault, though filled with love for each other, do their best not to fall into each other's arms as they investigate the lowest sections of Boston. The story does touch on how strict class distinction was in Boston at the time, and there's a lot about the teachings of the Catholic Church. The author paints a solid picture of the time period and life in Boston from different levels of society. There's not much in the way of crime solving or of deduction in this book. There is only a constant stream of questions the main characters pose to everyone who was at the scene of the crime. No one looks at the crime from the side of the accused cop because if they did, the logic of the story falls apart. If you like romance you'll like MURDER IN THE NORTH END, but if you want a good, solid, mystery with clever leads and an interesting solution, you won't get it here.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, December 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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