Scarlet Women is set in New York City during the Grant administration just as Tammany Hall is beginning to crumble. Corruption is pervasive and our hero, Harp, an ex-street urchin, has been hired by a wealthy but unscrupulous law firm, to locate the wife of a prominent merchant. She has disappeared. Several of the missing woman’s clothes have been found on the body of a prostitute killed in a warehouse, ostensibly during the course of a robbery. His investigations soon begin to lead to other bodies and a confrontation with the local precinct captain, who has predictably brutal ways of interrogating suspects and who has his own motives for wanting the murder of the prostitute solved as quickly as possible.

It’s a good mystery that captures the gulf between rich and poor and what it must have been like to live in New York City after the Civil War. It has numerous little details such as little explanations about
the two kinds of horse-drawn trolleys, and about the laborious methods for clearing snow off the trolley tracks. Teams of ten horses pulled plows that pushed the snow off the tracks. The piles were then shoveled
by cheap immigrant labor into other wagons to be dumped into the river. ( )

When the young wife of a prominent attorney goes missing in 19th-century New York, he hires the police's best investigator Harp to find her. Found in a warehouse sometime later dressed in the missing woman's velvet ball gown is a prostitute who has had her throat cut. Harp must discover who the prostitute is, why she is dressed in a ball gown and where the attorney's wife has gone. Along the way, Harp must talk to the demi-monde of society, criminals and must deal with the police themselves who don't want the case solved.

I really enjoyed this book. It had a very good plot and I give it an A! ( )

Marvin Albert's last (I believe) book, written under yet another pseudonym, is disappointing in a number of ways. For one thing, it's too long. Albert's stories worked best when he kept the action going non-stop. In this one, it feels like he is padding it to reach an acceptable length for a novel that is intended to grab readers of Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Albert did a lot of research on 1871 New York City, and it seems that almost all of it is crammed into the book, but these historical facts are presented more as asides than being well integrated into the story. And a lot of them, as we realize by the time we get to the end, are not particularly necessary. Albert seems particularly fascinated with modes of transportation - we learn all about how one got up and down Manhattan in 1871 as well as how to get to Brooklyn and Staten Island, including names of the ferries! In this type of book, it is also necessary to throw in some real people, and Albert comes up with some interesting ones, most notably the sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, whom you can look up on Wikipedia.

The real problem with the book is the plotting. There just isn't any real narrative drive here. The lead character, the mysterious Harp, is interesting enough and no doubt would have developed into a fuller character had Albert lived to continue this book as a series, but Harp's investigation into the disappearance of a lawyer's wife, which is somehow tied together with the brutal murder of a prostitute, leads him on a meandering series of interviews with way too many characters, introduced it seems for no other reason than to use up a little more of the historical research, and a few brushes with death that fail to generate much excitement, although the description of trudging through the blizzard with body parts going numb that occurs near the end of the book is pretty good. In the end, the solution to the mystery is too simple - and you probably figured it out a couple of hundred pages earlier, if not the rationale behind it - and the book ends rather abruptly. There is also a love story woven through it, rather unconvincingly.

On the good side, despite the typical maleness of Harp, Albert goes out of his way to portray some of the struggles - both private and public - women were going through in their quest to be treated as equals to men. Despite the book's narrative failings, a lot of the history and atmosphere will stick with me. ( )