Book Review: Victorian Detective Thriller Noir

 The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason (Algonquin)

A deliciously twisty Victorian detective thriller focusing on a serial killer with a sinister signature targeting Florence Nightingale and her valiant nurses, first in 1855 Crimea (“the Beast of the Crimean”) and twelve years later in London.  Nightingale has dedicated her life to improving the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey, despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is dispatched from England to Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital to find the killer. The suspects abound: doctors, military men, journalists, and others, most of whom would gladly see Nightingale and her uppity women packed back to London. The death of the prime suspect closes the case.

In the second timeline, the killings have begun again just as a movement to enfranchise more voters—men for now but women in the future--is getting underway. As Field gets drawn into the current investigation, he wonders if he’d gotten the wrong suspect back in Crimea or are the new killings the work of a demented copycat.

Along the way, Field encounters real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli and John Stuart Mill to novelist Wilkie Collins and, of course, Florence Nightingale herself.

I found The Nightingale Affair to be a fast, absorbing read. The story moves swiftly from present to past, past to present, with characters I cared about, plot twists, chases, and intrigue.

Trigger warning for gore and misogyny-related violence.

Reprint: Lower Suicide Rates in Teachers and Librarians

 

Teachers and librarians are among those least likely to die by suicide − public health researchers offer insights on what this means for other professions

One reason teachers have a low suicide rate may be that they find meaning in their jobs. Digital Vision/Getty Images

Jordan Batchelor, Arizona State University; Charles Max Katz, Arizona State University, and Taylor Cox, Arizona State University

Where you work affects your risk of dying by suicide. For example, loggers, musicians and workers in the oil and gas industries have much higher rates of suicide than the rest of the population.

But on the flip side, some professions have very low rates of suicide. One of them is education. National and state data shows that educators in the U.S., including teachers, professors and librarians, are among the least likely to die by suicide.

We’re a team of researchers at the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University. We manage Arizona’s Violent Death Reporting System, part of a surveillance system sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with counterparts in all 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. We collect data on violent deaths, including suicide, thanks to agreements with local medical examiners and law enforcement.

When public health researchers like us look at suicide data, we often focus on high-risk populations to learn where intervention and prevention are most needed. But we can learn from low-risk populations such as educators too.

Why some professions have higher suicide rates

Over the past 25 years, the suicide rate in the U.S. has increased significantly.

The age-adjusted rate in 2022 was 14.2 suicides per 100,000 people, up from 10.9 a little over two decades earlier, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Epidemiologists often adjust data for age to allow for a fairer comparison of incidence rates across populations with different age distributions.

But not all populations are affected equally. For example, military veterans die by suicide at higher rates than civilians, as do men, older adults and American Indian and Alaska Natives, to name a few demographics. In 2022 the suicide rate for men, for instance, was 23 suicides per 100,000, versus 5.9 for women.

The rate of suicide among the working-age population is also growing. Over the past two decades it has increased by 33%, reaching a rate of 32 suicides per 100,000 for men and eight for women in 2021. And workers in certain occupations are at higher risk of dying by suicide than others.

The reasons why are complex and diverse. Workers in construction, an industry with some of the highest suicide rates, may face greater stigma getting help for mental health issues, while people in other fields such as law enforcement may be more exposed to traumatic experiences, which can harm their mental health.

In short, some explanations are directly tied to one’s work, such as having low job security, little autonomy or agency, and an imbalance of work efforts and rewards. Other factors are more indirect, such as an occupation’s demographic makeup or the type of personality that chooses a profession. Together, factors like these help explain the rate of suicide across occupations.

Book Review: Rain as a Luxury of the Very Rich

 The Rain Artist, by Claire Rudy Foster (Moonstruck Books)

In a dystopic future, the Earth is so polluted that pure water is a luxury enjoyed only by the ultra-rich. Rivers have run dry and the seas have become so heavily saline that whales are extinct. Quadrillionaires throw artificially generated “rain parties,” complete with handmade bespoke umbrellas created for each occasion by Celine Broussard, the last umbrella maker. The front of her workshop is rented by a florist, who seems to be a gentle soul, happy to arrange artificial flowers, but who is actually a far darker, far more dangerous character. And that’s before we learn just how dark and dangerous he really is. As a result of a dynastic power struggle, Celine finds herself framed for the patriarch’s murder. Soon she’s on the run across a devastated landscape, along with her terrifyingly competent tenant and a young woman desperate to terminate an illegal pregnancy.

I loved the gorgeous, sensually evocative prose that drew me into each setting through the direct experiences of the character. I loved even the unlovable characters and how the author portrayed their crimes and shortcomings in a way that allowed me to change how I felt and make up my own mind about them. I loved how the characters changed, finding both courage and fellowship on their flight.

In many ways, The Rain Maker doesn’t fit the usual dystopian-thriller genre. With sureness and skill, the author draws the reader into the world and its inhabitants, beginning with very accessible scenes and progressing, layering subtle details upon details, into a world like and unlike our own. She doesn’t hit us over the head with bizarre elements as she slowly and carefully creates a world in which they are plausible. In this way, the book is generous with its welcome to readers who are familiar with the genre as well as those who are new, naïve.

Gorgeous and unsettling and ultimately filled with hope. Highly recommended.

Short Book Reviews: Another Fun "Laundry Files" Novel

 Season of Skulls (A Novel in the World of the Laundry Files), by Charles Stross (Tor)

I’ve loved “The Laundry Files” by Charles Stross since the first adventure, a delicious blend of spy action adventure and Lovecraftian horror, with a dry sense of humor and a touch of romance. The series begins in a present-day world where magic is a branch of computational mathematics (i.e., if you get sufficiently powerful computers, they tap into magic, often with results you really, really don’t want, like awakening ancient powers and opening gates to other dimensions). Now, many volumes later, Britain is under “New Management” and the Prime Minister is an Elder God of terrifying power. Eve Starkey, once the hyperorganized assistant to an unscrupulous magician, is just trying to get her life back and stay under the radar…and fails at both.

This latest installment has all the tension, wit, and quirky imagination of its predecessors, but with a bit more, very satisfying romance thrown in. Poor Eve has been through so much, and her ex-boss, perhaps not-so-ex-husband is such a loathsome toad, she deserves a little happiness in the end. Stross delivers all this and more.

Great fun for lovers of the series

Reprint: Legal Ethics and the Constitution

 

Justice Department lawyers work for justice and the Constitution – not the White House

The U.S. flag flies above Department of Justice headquarters on Jan. 20, 2024, in Washington. J. David Ake/Getty Images

Cassandra Burke Robertson, Case Western Reserve University

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

Since then, the DOJ has generally been run as an impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics.

Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump administration.

In February 2025, seven DOJ attorneys resigned, rather than follow orders from Attorney General Pam Bondi to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Adams was indicted in September 2024, during the Biden administration, for alleged bribery and campaign finance violations.

One DOJ prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, wrote in his Feb. 15 resignation letter that while he held no negative views of the Trump administration, he believed the dismissal request violated DOJ’s ethical standards.

Among more than a dozen DOJ attorneys who have recently been terminated, the DOJ fired Erez Reuveni, acting deputy chief of the department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, on April 15. Reuveni lost his job for speaking honestly to the court about the facts of an immigration case, instead of following political directives from Bondi and other superiors.

Reuveni was terminated for acknowledging in court on April 14 that the Department of Homeland Security had made an “administrative error” in deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, against court orders. DOJ leadership placed Reuveni on leave the very next day.

Bondi defended the decision, arguing that Reuveni had failed to “vigorously advocate” for the administration’s position.

I’m a legal ethics scholar, and I know that as more DOJ lawyers face choices between following political directives and upholding their profession’s ethical standards, they confront a critical question: To whom do they ultimately owe their loyalty?

President Donald Trump speaks before Pam Bondi is sworn in as attorney general at the White House on Feb. 5, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Identifying the real client

All attorneys have core ethical obligations, including loyalty to clients, confidentiality and honesty to the courts. DOJ lawyers have additional professional obligations: They have a duty to seek justice, rather than merely win cases, as well as to protect constitutional rights even when inconvenient.