The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor (2017)Read about the other entries on the list.
Over five days in early September 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed England’s capital, gutting its medieval core and pushing tens of thousands of people out onto the streets. Amazingly, only a handful of residents were recorded as having been killed during that conflagration. In Taylor’s tale, one of the men watching flames consume St. Paul’s Cathedral is James Marwood, a beleaguered junior government clerk and the son of a republican who lost everything when Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth crumbled and Charles II restored the monarchy in 1660. Spotting a boy too close to the blaze, Marwood tries to pull him away—realizing only too late that “he” is in fact a quick-tempered teenage girl, who bites him on the hand for his trouble and then filches his cloak. It turns out, that hellion is Catherine “Cat” Lovett, the daughter of a once-powerful religious extremist, who dreams of becoming an architect and escaping an arranged marriage. What links these two protagonists is not simply their families’ inimical relationships with the English throne, but the discovery, in the rubble of St. Paul’s, of a dead man—stabbed and left with his thumbs laced together. Marwood is presently dragooned into investigating this homicide, as well as later atrocities, while political turmoil threatens to devastate the city as surely as any inferno. Taylor shows an assiduous researcher’s touch in re-creating ruined London, though his skill at making us care about two lead players damaged and adrift among forces beyond their control may be yet more estimable.
--Marshal Zeringue
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