Charles Unwin is a clerk at the Agency, a detective agency. He writes up the case files for one detective, Travis Sivart. He prides himself on the work he does but lately he has been entertaining a fantasy of just getting on the train and leaving his job and the city behind.
We are never told the name of the city, but it is large gloomy place where the rain never seems to end. In addition to his fantasy of walking away from the city and his job at the Agency, Unwin has become obsessed with a young woman he has noticed at the train station. She is there every day, seemingly waiting for someone to arrive who never does.
Unwin has also had a dream in which he comes home to find Travis Sivart taking a bath in Unwin's bathtub. Sivart tells Unwin to remember two things, Chapter Eighteen and that Sivart was wrong about the girl. He doesn't say what girl, just that he was wrong about her.
Unwin arrives at work to find he has been promoted from clerk to detective. But he doesn't want to be a detective and believes the promotion to be a mistake. So he goes to see the man in charge of the detectives to inform him about the error but finds the man is dead in the man's office. And Unwin is now in charge of discovering the killer while being suspected of being the killer and of finding where Sivart has gone. He also has to figure out who all these mysterious women are who have suddenly entered his life, including the woman at the train station; his new assistant, Emily Doppel; and infamous criminal Cleopatra Greenwood; and one Hilda Palsgrave. Palsgrave used be one of the main attractions at Caligari's Carnival until Caligari's disappearance left the carnival in the hands of organized crime gang led by Enoch Hoffman, a biloquist, and twin brothers Jasper and Josiah Rook.
As Unwin's unwanted investigation continues, he finds that Sivart wasn't just wrong about the "girl." He was wrong about almost all the crimes he solved. And that someone at the top knows that and wants it to stay that way. And the rain continues to fall, making everything and everyone wet and cold.
This was a fairly good read. I think I am not the right audience for this book though. I found it rather slow and I found the constant rain, which is like one of the main characters in the story, depressing. Just too cold, wet and gloomy for my taste. But I think a lot of readers would enjoy this mysterious, damp story.
Check out the review by Michael Moorcock in The Guardian.
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