Review: The Man Who Bought London

The Man Who Bought London by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"A man who marries for money is like a dog that climbs a steeple for a bone. He gets his meal, but there isn't any comfortable place to sleep it off."

This book features not one, but two romances between someone who's rich and someone who isn't, one of the parties being the title character. King Kerry is buying up property in London on behalf of an American "trust," and as part of that purchases a department store where our heroine works (but is about to not work; she's been late a number of times, and is inclined to snark her boss, rather wonderfully). She reminds Kerry of another girl who had a tragic end, so he takes her on as his secretary.

Twelve years later, Wallace revisited the department store as a setting and the "new woman" as a main character in Barbara On Her Own . Barbara is more central, and more capable, than this book's Elsie, driving the plot where Elsie tends to just ride along.

There's a complicated twist at the heart of the story that only comes out at the end. It's potentially controversial for modern audiences, but it's a big spoiler, so I'll put it in spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[one of the characters is a biological woman who was raised as male by a mentally ill mother, and is not a good woman, a good man, or a good person, having had relationships that end in tragedy for the other party both as a woman and as a man, and constantly plotting and instigating crimes in the course of this story. (hide spoiler)]

It's fast-moving like all of Wallace's books, twisty, sometimes comedic and sometimes suspenseful. The ending, I felt, was abrupt and didn't give the wrap-up the time it deserved, but I enjoyed the journey there.

View all my reviews