Currently Reading: A early proof digital copy of Dangerous: A Lord Byron Mystery by Essie Fox

 

About the Author

Essie Fox was born and raised in rural Herefordshire, which inspires much of her writing. After studying English Literature at Sheffield University, she moved to London where she worked for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, then the book publishers George Allen & Unwin – before becoming self-employed in the world of art and design. Always an avid reader, Essie now spends her time writing historical gothic novels. Her debut, The Somnambulist, was shortlisted for the National Book Awards, and featured on Channel 4’s TV Book Club. The Last Days of Leda Grey, set in the early years of silent film, was selected as The Times Historical Book of the Month. Her latest novel, The Fascination is based in Victorian country fairgrounds, the glamour of the London theatres, and an Oxford Street museum full of morbid curiosities. Essie is also the creator of the popular blog: The Virtual Victorian. She has lectured on this era at the V&A, and the National Gallery in London.

About the Book

When fiction is fatal…

Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city

But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…

As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…

Rich in gothic atmosphere and drawing on real events and characters from Byron’s life, Dangerous is a riveting, dazzling historical thriller, as decadent, dark and seductive as the poet himself…

• Publisher: Orenda Books (April 24, 2025)
• Length: 300 pages
• ISBN13: 9781916788442

For more information about the author  and all her books, Orenda Books

A Review: The Fascination By Essie Fox

Victorian England. A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres. A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions…

Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn’t grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father’s quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as ‘Captain’.

Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man who has a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities … particularly the human kind. Resenting his grandson for his mother’s death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name.

Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell’s Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical ‘family’ of performers, freaks and outcasts.

But it is Theo’s fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of deceits, exposing the darkest secrets and threatening everything they know… 

Source: Review copy
Publication: 22nd June 2023 from Orenda Books
PP: 300
ISBN-13: 978-1914585524

Many thanks to Orenda Books for my eArc!

'The evening nightingales are singing. 
The month of August lit with gold;

I still keep the rose you gave me,

I watch its red silk heart unfold.

The breath of rose, the sound of bird's song

Are ever tangled with romance.

Tis my pleasure to remember;

The day when you first came to me...'

The Fascination is filled with darkness and depravity at every turn where children like Theo and twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are at the hands of parents and grandparents who are supposed to care for them and guide them through life. Well, forget it. Throw all sense of sympathy, empathy and sensitivitiy out the window while you read this Victorian gothic kaliediscope of a novel. 

After reading and reviewing all of the author's works, Essie Fox has done it. I am finally speechless and in awe of what she has created. The Fascination is beautifully written about two different families, The Seabrook's and The Lovell's living their lives without any real love and care from anyone around them. If only their loved ones could accept them for their differences instead of profiting off of them, it would be a different novel.

The Fascination was a very emotional novel to read. Definitely, a page turner. I loved the atmosphere and descriptions of the gardens and walking outside and around Lord Seabrook's home. In the end, all I wanted to do was scoop up all the children and take care of them.  However, what made me smile was how Essie Fox used excerpts of Brothers Grimm, Snow-White and Red-Rose a beautiful fairy tale throughout chapters of the novel. I did not miss the description of a painting by Millais on the wall, mentions of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins' A Woman in White. 

For more information or to pre-order a copy, Orenda Books

A review of The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox

During the oppressive heat wave of 1976 a young journalist, Ed Peters, finds an Edwardian photograph in a junk shop in the Brighton Lanes. It shows an alluring, dark-haired girl, an actress whose name was Leda Grey.

Enchanted by the image, Ed learns Leda Grey is still living - now a recluse in a decaying cliff-top house she once shared with a man named Charles Beauvois, a director of early silent film. As Beauvois's muse and lover, Leda often starred in scenes where stage magic and trick photography were used to astonishing effect. 

But, while playing a cursed Egyptian queen, the fantasies captured on celluloid were echoed in reality when Beauvois suspected a love affair between Leda and her leading man. A horrific accident left Leda abandoned and alone for more than half a century - until Ed Peters finds her and hears the secrets of her past, resulting in a climax more haunting than any to be found in the silent films of Charles Beauvois.

Paperback, 360 pages

Expected publication: November 3rd 2016 by Orion

Title:  The Last Days of Leda Grey

ISBN:  1409146251

Theda Bara

Since, The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox is soon to be published it makes my review a bit difficult. I cannot go into as much detail as I want to. It will be hard to hold myself back but understand in order for the reader to completely get lost in this gorgeous story, I must refrain from gushing. It will be a first for me!~   

 

 Theda Bara

 'Leda Grey' is told from the male perspective of journalist, Ed Peters who in 1976 walks into a shop to look around when he sees an old photograph of a silent film actress. He falls instantly in love with this coal black eyed, raven haired beauty. When the store owner tells him that Leda Grey is still alive and living nearby in a cliff-top house called, White Cliff he is off in a shot to find his enchantress.  

There is much more to the store owner and his relationship with recluse, Leda Grey. As for Ed Peters, well, his curiosity to find this beauty, now old, grey haired and withered by time, will change both their lives forever. 

 Theda Bara

What I just adored about this story was meeting old recluse Leda Grey.  What must have happened during this young, teenage girl's short film career to result in her locking herself away for years? Why would a young woman choose to live alone, isolated in her crumbling abode with rarely any human contact instead of venturing out into the real world? Even with the past of a brief acting career, some secrets should be left alone undisturbed only to be viewed on celluloid or on a movie screen in a crowded movie house stinking of stale oiled buttered popcorn with nothing but the echoes of the hum of the projector running upstairs in a locked room. 

 Theda Bara in The She Devil, 1918

Author, Essie Fox has done something truly impossible. She has taken the persona of a well-known movie actress, transported her back into 1976 aged and mentally effusive. Having three male counterparts, one an old ghostly lover, Charles Beauvois to tell aspects of her film career.  It is brilliant I tell you.  Also, Leda Grey herself unlocks her past secrets through clues hidden within her silent films made with Charles Beauvois. Journalist, Ed Peters is along for the ride as he pieces together this once beautiful woman's hidden past. Now, what is discovered and what occurs is beautifully written through journalistic interviews between Ed Peters and Leda Grey. 

The Last Days of Leda Grey is Essie Fox's best written work yet!  I cannot convey this enough how much I fell in love with her characters, the setting, the music of the nineteen seventies, her descriptions, her words, the story is ethereal in nature, Gothic in tone and dripping with gorgeous prose.   

Theda Bara film

To purchase your copy of The Last Days of Leda Grey in the United Kingdom,  Amazon UK

If you live in the U.S., and want to buy The Last Days of Leda Grey visit,  Book Depository

 

The Goddess and the Thief by Essie Fox: A Review!

Uprooted from her home in India, Alice is raised by her aunt, a spiritualist medium in Windsor. When the mysterious Mr Tilsbury enters their lives, Alice is drawn into a plot to steal the priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond, claimed by the British Empire at the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars.

Said to be both blessed and cursed, the sacred Indian stone exerts its power over all who encounter it: a handsome deposed maharajah determined to claim his rightful throne, a man hell-bent on discovering the secrets of eternity, and a widowed queen who hopes the jewel can draw her husband's spirit back.

In the midst of all this madness, Alice must discover a way to regain control of her life and fate... 

Maharajah Duleep Singh outside Osbourne House

Remember, death is but a charade, a thinly veiled door to enlightened lives where we are reborn and joined in bliss with those who have passed to The Other Side. The material and immaterial are never truly parted but bound by an invisible cord, delicate but immutable, linking the realms of the living and dead...those souls who exist in both Heaven and Earth.

Do you believe in other worlds, of lives ever after, of heavens on earth? My ayah did, and from her lips, there dripped such honeyed promises. One tale there was she used to tell, and I heard it so often that, even now, I recall her every word by heart... 

Far, far away, my heart's dearest, is a palace atop of Mount Kailash where Shiva lives in perfect bliss with his goddess bride, Parvati. But, there was a time, long years before, when Shiva loved another:  a woman made of mortal flesh whose name was Sati, Perfect wife.

 Sati adored Lord Shiva. She worshipped the ground on which he walked. But her happiness was blighted when her father refused to accept the fact that his daughter, a lady of radiant beauty, should have wed the god who was uncouth, with his long braided hair which was never combed, and his dirty flesh so often clothed in nothing but stinking animal skins.

 

 Essie Fox

Essie Fox divides her time between Windsor and Bow in the East End of London. Before taking up writing, Essie worked as an illustrator-designing greetings cards, gift wrap and decorative ceramics. Before that she worked in a Dickensian office in Bloomsbury’s Museum Street, as an editorial assistant by the publishers, George Allen & Unwin. 

 Her debut novel, The Somnambulist, was selected for the Channel 4 Book Club and was shortlisted in the New Writer of the Year category of the 2012 National Book Awards. Her follow-up was Elijah's Mermaid a novel in keeping with her dark Victorian Gothic theme. Now, she gives us her third and latest, 'The Goddess and the Thief.'

 * * *

Woven within the pages of 'The Goddess and the Thief' is the mysticism of Hindu Mythology juxtaposing the spirituality of the essence of reincarnation for Alice, her Aunt Mercy, and Mr. Lucian Tilsbury. Those are the main characters you will meet almost immediately through the letters of Alice's dead mother and through the thoughts of Alice herself. One of the aspects that makes 'The Goddess and the Thief' not only unique by its nature of the storyline and the plot are the written thoughts of Hindu Goddess Shiva and Pravati cleverly placed throughout this two-part gem of a masterpiece!  Background characters are always there as well taking up space in the ether to support the subplot; thus, making for mesmerizing reading. 

'The Goddess and the Thief' begins in 1843 India to the Great Exhibition in London, England, in 1851 with appearances throughout by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, as well as Maharajah Duleep Singh. It wouldn't be Victorian Britain without her majesty Queen Victoria now would it?  I found these chapters to be some of my favorites learning about the friendship between Victoria and the maharajah.  The beautiful love between Shiva and Pravati was new to me and I really enjoyed reading the underlying aspects of reincarnation the author weaves into Alice's storyline. Always a wonderful occurrence to come upon an aspect of a novel where you find yourself curious to learn more about another culture.

Already well familiar with Essie Fox's novels, having read the first two: The Somnambulist and Elijah's Mermaid, I was not prepared to become so entwined in every aspect of  'The Goddess and the Thief.' Author, Essie Fox, has once again chosen a part of her research that sparks an interest and pursues it with abundance. Luckily for her readers.  Focusing on a well-known jewel the Koh-i-nor Diamond, a few séances, two troubled families and a few secrets they would prefer left hidden, I cannot urge you enough to read  'The Goddess and the Thief' for yourself.  This is a surreal and spiritual story so beautifully written and told so cleverly that you will not be able to put it down!

Thank you so much to Orion Publishing and Essie Fox for providing me with an uncorrected proof. 

 The Goddess and the Thief by Essie Fox is due out in the U.K. on 5 December, 2013 by Orion Publishing. 

It is available on Amazon UK 

For Essie Fox's author page go to Orion Publishing

Essie runs a gorgeous blog as well, http://virtualvictorian.blogspot.com/

Elijah's Mermaid Deep Waters. Dark Secrets. by Essie Fox: A Review

Since she was found as a baby, floating in the Thames one foggy night, the web-toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted and pampered there, it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder. 

Meanwhile, the orphaned twins, Lily and Elijah, have shared an idyllic childhood, raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather, Augustus Lamb. But when Lily and Elijah go on a visit to London, a chance meeting with the ethereal Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, binding their fates together in a dark and dangerous way...

In this bewitching, sensual novel, Essie Fox has written another tale of obsessive love and betrayal, moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, and into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents - a world in which nothing and no-one is quite what they seem to be.

 J.W. Waterhouse's Mermaid, 1900

"Will they find me again - those ghosts? Will they follow and watch when I walk on the water? Look! I am doing it now. You might think me mad to say such things but my thoughts are so clear as the beads of light that gleam on the stone of the obelisk, that sparkle like gems in bare branches of trees, so bright that I have to lift my hands to  protect my eyes from the glare of the sun - the white jewel that has turned the whole wide world into this dreamland of ice and stone."  Pearl

Elijah's Mermaid is broken up into four parts, with three young protagonists: Pearl, Elijah, and Lily taking turns telling their story. The setting is Victorian London. Essie Fox again, in this her second novel, proliferates each page with such realistic Victorian dialogue and an enchanting writing style the reader feels as if they are walking along Cheyne Walk in Chelsea when Pearl is found in The Thames and later on with The Lamb's at their residence, Kingsland House, Kingsland, Herefordshire, England around 1855.

Not only does Essie Fox know the Victorian era, she knows her Pre-Raphaelites as well; her passion leaps off every page. Some names are obvious i.e. Gabriel, Millais, and Rossetti mentioned but physical and descriptive hints could be found if you are familiar with such notables of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Brethren) Indeed!  It could just be me reading too much into it but grandfather of Lily and Elijah's Augustus Lamb was reminiscent of grandfather to his granddaughter and grandson Sir Edward Burne-Jones! Even The Lamb's loving glimpses of conversations between Lily and Augustus reminded me so much of Three Houses by Angela Thirkell!

Water is the primary element holding the basis of the story together for good reason which is later explained as the story of Pearl intertwines with Lily and Elijah once the story gets darker and more Gothic. Mermaid is in the title for specific reasons as Essie Fox first introduces the reader to a young woman found drowned in The Thames; then baby Pearl is discovered in 1850 and I just loved how she later describes herself, 'the bastard child saved by the river by Tip that night when my mother drowned herself for shame’ – who was brought up in a brothel by the rather whimsical name of The House of Mermaids. This was a ‘most prestigious Chelsea abode’, where the owner of the house, Mrs Hibbert, indulged the ‘every whim of those men wishing to use the brothel’s services.' 

There are brothels, beautiful gardens and freak shows that appear as the story gets darker; more characters are there to 'guide' Lily and Elijah i.e. the absolutely horrible and hated Osbourne Black, the ever present Mrs. Hibbert and Uncle Frederick Hall etc. They are needed as numerous red herrings, twists, turns abound in this luscious Victorian Gothic tale. Pay attention and keep your wits about you for not everything is as it appears! 

In closing, if you dear reader find yourself at a loss or just confused with these characters and their motives, fear not, for Essie Fox writes a helpful 'summation' of sorts at the end entitled, 'The Real Historical Characters Who Have Influenced Those In Elijah's Mermaid' along with a vocabulary list of Victorian Slang. 

In fairness, I did not find much lacking in Elijah's Mermaid. I feel I must say something so any readers who are not used to reading Victorian era slang and 19th century dialogue might be put off or find themselves growing impatient. There are also numerous characters, London locations and places mentioned so again it might be off-putting. However, I revel in this sort of Victorian cultural and Gothic tale. I rarely find such a beautifully written one, as well. 

I highly recommend Elijah's Mermaid by Essie Fox. This her second novel is even more entertaining and engaging than her first effort The Somnambulist, though, I loved it as well!   

Elijah's Mermaid by Essie Fox is out now available in the United Kingdom. This was my purchase and not a free copy. 

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