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"The House on Vesper Sands is a delicious book. Somehow it manages to do a hundred marvelous things at once: Funny, eerie, tender, haunting and unsettling, smokily atmospheric and fantastically enjoyable, it's a nineteenth-century supernatural procedural mystery that is also an impassioned meditation on love and duty, loss, suffering, power and injustice. I absolutely loved it." -- Helen MacdonaldWith all the wit of a Jane Austen novel, and a case as beguiling as any in Sherlock Holmes' casebook, Paraic O'Donnell introduces a detective duo for the ages, and slowly unlocks the secrets of a startling Victorian mystery.London, 1893: high up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O'Donnell's Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: why does the seamstress choose to jump out of that window? Why is there a cryptic message sewn into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances?On the case is Gideon Bliss, a young Cambridge dropout who is in love with one of the missing girls, and his partner Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious.