Louisa Barrett is the headmistress of an exclusive girl's school in Buffalo New York. It is the turn of the century, and the waters of nearby Niagara Falls are being harnessed to provide the new miracle of electricity. They are also providing huge profits for the cream of Buffalo society, the very people who have given Miss Barrett their patronage.
But Louisa Barrett has secrets of her own, regarding her goddaughter Grace,
whose mother, Louisa's best friend, has recently died. Grace's father, Tom Sinclair, is in charge of the Niagara Falls power plant, and when an outspoken engineer dies, Louisa can't help but look at him as a suspect. But given that there is a nascent environmentalist movement growing to protest the diversion of water from the Falls, when another death occurs, Louisa finds herself in the middle of a deepening, and threatening, puzzle.
So far so good, and Lauren Belfer weaves a fascinating historical tale, book-ended by the dark side of President Grover Cleveland's character, and the assassination of President William McKinley. It will draw comparisons with Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and perhaps also to The Devil In The White City, since the Pan-American Exposition serves as a backdrop for much of the action. This was Buffalo at its elegant peak, and Belfer makes the most of the history.
But the book's strength is also its weakness. Miss Barrett may think she is a mover and shaker in her society, but in the end she is really its victim, and the novel follows the very slow progression of her self-awareness. Very very slow, at times, as scenes seem to repeat themselves to the point where the reader is checking to see if the bookmark didn't fall onto the wrong page by mistake. And despite the Hawthornian touches of little Grace, her ultimate fate seems somehow a modern device, aimed at avoiding the necessity of further plot complications.
This goes along with a number of strange lapses in the writing; its point of view is often 'enlightened anachronism', allowing the audience its feelings of superiority, but there are also some howlers. One character is described as coming from 'Shaker stock'. Furniture can come from Shaker stock, but since a cornerstone of the Shaker movement was abstinence from sex, children did not. But it sounds so old New England! There's also a lovely sentence, in which Louisa ponders that 'she'd suffered none of the dire consequences that traditionalists promised women who broke with their 'proper' roles (such as insanity).' I never knew insanity was a proper role for a woman. Live and learn!
Michael Carlson
