AmySea

I don't know how I felt about the mysteries in this volume of the  Detective Murdoch series,  but I really do enjoy the way the books look at the underbelly of Victorian Toronto juxtaposed against the city's upper class.  I like that Detective Murdoch is not necessarily the stiff, formal, proper Victorian era man as he is in the TV series.  He's more realistic and human in the books, more like I would expect a copper of his time, and a person of his class to be.

The mysteries in Under the Dragon's Tail were mysterious.  But they weren't, although they were.  You'd have to read the book to understand. They kept me guessing, re-evaluating, trying to suss out motives.  They made me work hard, and the way Jennings told this story made me keep pushing my pet theories aside.  Sometimes your instincts can tell you things that your conscious mind won't see.  I don't know if I was satisfied with the denouement, or if I wanted it to be more surprising.  It fit the crimes, though, and was believable.

There was an awful lot of brutality done to children in this book, but somehow it didn't seem gratuitous or really even out of place for the time and locations in which this story was set.  It wasn't pleasant, but it was, given the time, appropriate to the story.

In summary, I liked it, and I'll read the next.