Murphy's Law by Rhys Bowen

[meganbmoore]

When Molly Murphy accidentally killed the son of the local landowner when he tried to rape her, she knew the courts would never side with a poor Irish girl over a rich Englishman, so she fled to Liverpool, hoping to gain passage aboard a boat to New York before the police caught up with her. In Liverpool, she meets Kathleen O’Connor, whose brother was executed for murder when a landowner’s agent was accidentally killed during a protest against evicting a neighbor, and whose husband, Seamus, was forced to flee to America after organizing a strike. Now Seamus has sent money for passage for Kathleen and her two children, but Kathleen has consumption, and won’t be allowed aboard the boat.

So the two women come up with a plan. Kathleen will give Molly her ticket and Molly can use her name to get to New York, as long as Molly will take care of her two children, and see them delivered to their father. Once the passage is over, however, Molly and the children are delayed overnight on Ellis Island, and a man who had been seen harassing Molly during the passage is killed. With herself and Michael, a young man she befriended during passage, as the police’s chief suspects, Molly sets out to find the killer on her own. Her chief ally and antagonist both is Daniel Sullivan, a young Irish-American police captain who may not be quite as law abiding as he seems.

The tone and plot of Murphy’s Law is as different from that of Her Royal Spyness, the only other Rhys Bowen I’ve read, as can be. While HRS was fun upper class 1930s fluff, ML is a darker look at the life of Irish immigrants in turn of the century New York City -both the passage and lifestyle. The living conditions aboard the boat for Molly and the children aren’t pretty, and neither are the Irish tenements they find themselves living in in New York City. In addition, Molly’s search for employment, not to mention the threats a woman alone in 1900 faces, aren’t white washed. The mystery, while important, isn’t the focus of the book, and is almost window dressing for the world of 1900 Irish New York City, though it’s final resolution is very tied to the politics and realities of the time. I like the aspect of Molly being guilty of one crime while trying to keep it secret as she proves herself innocent of another, but I can’t help but think the resolution of her deception about her identity was a little too tidy. Then again, I doubt anyone involved had never bent the rules before. I’m definitely interested in seeing how other books in the series turn out.

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Heh, would you believe I still haven't read this particular one? The Molly Murphy books are another one where I've been going out of order as friends gave me books or I picked further volumes up on BookMooch, and I still haven't managed to get my hands on the first one. (Obviously I am not terribly worried about spoilers, as this background is all mentioned in later books, and as you note the history and characterization is really more the draw than the mystery plots.)

The lack of white-washing is definitely a constant here; Molly has a lot of financial ups-and-downs trying to work out employment and housing, helping provide for the ever-strapped O'Connors, and so forth. It's not unrelievedly grim, and there are some fluffier comedy-of-manners moments as she falls in with a gay Bohemian crowd, goes undercover in upper-crust settings, and so forth -- but at the same time, there are enough visits back to the tenements, drearier undercover assignments in sweatshops, etc. that you never lose sight of how the other half lives; and Molly's romantic and employment difficulties all keep a focus on the difficult constraints in women's lives, rich or poor. There's still enough levity from events and humorous, witty characters, including Molly herself, that the series as a whole never feels like a total downer to me, but there's enough grit that they never feel like absolute froth, either.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Most of the details I mentioned are in the first 40 pages, and everything else except for Daniel is mentioned on the back.

There are bits of humor mixed in, but I think Bowen is mostly concerned with setting up the tone of the series here. The "undercover in the upper classes" thing, I suspect, is something Bowen is really fond of. It shows up in HRS, too, but there, it's someone who's actually a higher class than her employers trying to be lower class.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Daniel's a recurring character, so he's also no spoiler to anyone who's read the later books. ;)

I kind of get the feeling that the class-crossing undercover thing here may be a subset for Bowen generally finding it really interesting doing culture-clash, fish-out-of-water stuff; in the books where Molly is spending a lot of time with sweatshop workers and early trade union supporters, she's one of the few Irish immigrants in the midst of groups that are largely Eastern European and Jewish. Her eventual Bohemian friends are from wealthy backgrounds, but they've mostly rejected "proper" society to live in an eccentric artsy milieu. And in the one where she's undercover amongst the upper crust, she's doubly out of place as a recent immigrant, pretending to be a visiting relation from the Olde Country amongst a wealthy, successful second-generation Irish-American family. Even romantically -- keeping it very vague so as not to be too spoilery, but there's one rather promising relationship in a later book that ends up foundering over cultural/religious differences.