Review: The Rose in the Wheel

In the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, seen through the filter of almost two hundred years, life in Regency England seems crude and terribly hard. In this richly evocative novel Rizzolo brings that period to vibrant life so that readers can have a more intimate understanding of the hardships as well as the joys of life among what we now call the middle class.

Two women are the central characters of this novel, one struggling with the difficulties of a usually absent husband, the other celibate, dead, murdered mysteriously and found lying in the street outside a building in London, after being run over by a racing horse and carriage. The building housed the St. Catherine Society, an organization dedicated to helping impoverished women. The St. Catherine Society, an organization founded by the very woman who now lay dead in the street. It is a time when females at all levels of society felt the weight of harsh circumscription by society, a time when proper women followed the dictates and the wishes of the male members of their families. The founder of the St. Catherine Society was an unusual woman for her time, for any time.

Penelope Wolfe, wife of artist Jeremy Wolfe, and mother of ten-year old daughter Sara, struggles to maintain all the appearances of a proper life in spite of the long and often unexplained absences of her husband. Constance Tyrone, unmarried strong willed daughter of a baronet has determined that she will use the power and authority of her class and her inheritance to help less fortunate women, in spite of family and social approbation. Now she is dead, struck down at a time of night when no self-respecting woman, even one as emancipated as Miss Tyrone, would be found abroad unaccompanied. The dark streets of London were hardly safe for anyone at that time. When Penelope learns that her husband had been commissioned to do a portrait of Miss Tyrone, and when his sketches hint rather baldly of a sensual connection between artist and subject, he becomes an immediate target of the Bow Street investigation. Believing her husband innocent, Penelope Wolf is moved to go where few women of the time would be found. She seeks answers and in that way her life begins to parallel that of the dead woman.

The story takes Penelope Wolfe into a variety of circumstances and she intersects with some interesting characters, not the least of whom is a London detective named John Chase. Author Rizzolo weaves a number of gritty realities of Regency London into her story and one can learn a good deal about relationships between the classes, about the legal system, the police agencies and social mores. But through it all, this compelling story of one woman's efforts to assist in the finding of truth about the murder of another woman, particularly in this context, will hold reader's attention to the last page. A secondary story, probably true, about a series of brutal killings at the same time seems needlessly tacked on to the main fabric of The Rose in The Wheel, otherwise an excellent novel.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Carl Brookins - RAM

Book Review: The Rose in the Wheel