After taking a full decade off from writing, Robert McCammon decided to rethink his career and when he finally returned with Speaks the Nightbird
in 2002 he was almost a different writer. After winning a remarkable three Stoker Awards in the '80s and having a handful of bestsellers, in the early '90s you could see him going through a Melvillian authorial meltdown as his books became more brilliant, more quirky and less commercially successful, culminating in 1992 with the remarkable Gone South, which was too strange for most readers, though it remains one of my favorites. Then he just disappeared and not a word was seen in print for 10 years.
When he returned to writing in 2002 it was with a mammoth, Dickensian historical mystery novel which turned out to be the first in a series. Speaks the Nightbird is set in colonial America in 1699 and centers around the experiences of a young magistrate's clerk named Matthew Corbett, who has a dangerous compulsion to find out the truth at any cost. It is the story of his disastrous trip with the judge he works for to provide judicial services to an isolated and very troubled community, a trip which plunges Corbett into the middle of a dangerous mystery which he barely survives. But Corbett does survive, and lives on to be the central character in what is developing into a very promising series of novels.
The Queen of Bedlam
is the second entry in the series, set in the early 1700s in Corbett's home town of New York City. It paints a phenomenally well developed picture of the colonial city and its inhabitants, with lots of interesting characters and great attention to factual details of the period. The characters include the tradesmen and businessmen of the city, orphans raised with Corbett in the public orphanage who are integrating into society with varying degrees of success, and prominent historical characters including the notorious Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who was the first Royal Governor of New York and a flamboyant transvestite.
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