Set more than 100 years before the founding of the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, Robert J. Lloyd’s astonishingly gripping mystery, The Bloodless Boy, features two natural philosophers (scientists before we had the term scientist) investigating a fiendish series of murders in London. On a very cold January morning in 1678, Robert Hooke and his former assistant, Harry Hunt, are charged by Justice of the Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to find out who is responsible for the death of a boy. Why two natural philosophers? Well, the boy was found entirely drained of blood. Who better to find out what really happened than two people dedicated to Reason, in a city on the edge of anti-Catholic fervor and superstition? Both men have followed their intellectual curiosity wherever it might take them: meteorology, cryptography, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, physics, microscopy, geology, and more. To them, it’s all Natural Philosophy instead of the narrow fields of later scientists. Which, I suppose, does make them good potential investigators, even if they’ve never actually dabbled in forensics.
Although Robert Hooke, on his way to becoming the Secretary of the Royal Society, has the more impressive reputation, it’s Harry Hunt who carries the action in The Bloodless Boy. Hunt has yet to make his own name in natural philosophy. But Hooke is a reluctant detective. He’d much rather be experimenting. When Hunt and Hooke discover that a coded cipher found with the boy’s body leads back to King Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, and the English Civil War, Hooke is absolutely ready to cease and desist. Even eighteen years after the Restoration, it’s best not to go poking into the past. Hunt, however, is unwilling to let injustice go unpunished in order to get back to the laboratory. He keeps poking, until he finds a deadly conspiracy that could lead the county to explode into sectarian violence once again.
Lloyd blends real history into his mystery. While Hooke and Hunt puzzle over blood and codes, we see hints of the very much factual Popish Plot and hear from conspirators Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. There are cameos of Charles II, John Locke, Hooke’s scientific rival Henry Oldenburg, Hortense Mancini, and Leveller preacher William Walwyn scattered throughout. (Lloyd even includes some stirring speeches from Walwyn that, even three hundred-ish years later had me ready to shout some amens.) I love when authors can do this in a way that doesn’t take away from the action or feel gratuitous. Rather, Lloyd plays in unknown spaces of actual history to give us a highly original mystery that even includes an intriguing solution to the historical Sir Edmund’s mysterious death in 1678.
Fans of mysteries and historical fiction will have a great time with The Bloodless Boy. I had such a good time that, as soon as I finished, I ordered a copy of the sequel, The Poison Machine.