A Review of Lyndsay Faye’s “Seven for a Secret”
A Mystery Novel for Black History Month
My contribution to this year’s Black History Month (or African Heritage Month, or whatever else you want to call it) is this 2013 novel by a white woman, Lyndsay Faye. I probably should be seeking out Black authors but have to sheepishly admit that the number of Black authors I know is rather limited, alas. However, this book has been sitting on my Kindle for more than seven years — I meant to get around to reading it after reading the first book in the series that Seven for a Secret belongs to, The Gods of Gotham. However, the book idled for some reason — I was probably too busy to read it — so now seemed like a good time to dust this one off and give it a go. If you are unaware, this is the second book of a trilogy surrounding a young police detective in 1840s New York City known as Timothy Wilde. Wilde can seemingly come up with the solution to the most impossible to solve crimes, sometimes pulling the answer right out of thin air. With Seven for a Secret, he has a bit of a doozy.
At the time of the novel’s setting, it was a historical fact that free Black men, women, and children living in the Northern U.S. would be captured by slave traders and sold as slaves to the South — despite their free status. There wasn’t much that could be done about this, save for the setting up of Vigilance Committees to prevent the capture of free Black people. In any event, in this book, a partially Black woman named Lucy Adams seeks out Timothy Wilde based on his reputation as an ace crime solver because her sister and nephew have fallen into the clutches of those who would sell them as slaves. However, once the sister and nephew are rescued, Wilde has a murder on his hands — Adams is found strangled to death in Wilde’s brother’s bed! A whole series of machinations fall into place from there, with subplot after subplot threatening to gum up the works of a story that seems to be unsolvable.
I found Seven for a Secret to be much more episodic than The Gods of Gotham. To that end, it is a bit of a lesser book — though how can one top The Gods of Gotham’s three endings? While Seven for a Secret doesn’t have the multiple threads to tie up and it does seem that Wilde solves this one with the scantest of clues to go on, it is fun and exhilarating as Wilde gradually paints himself into a corner in solving the murder. The Wilde series of books go into a great deal of detail as to the historical and political detail of the period in which it is set, and this includes using slang known as “Flash” to pepper the narrative. This is a bit distracting because the glossary with the “Flash” definitions is at the front of the book, and you can’t easily turn back to it when reading on a Kindle. So a lot of the “Flash” tends to go by with a bit of a, well, flash — that is, if you’re reading an e-copy.
While the book is enjoyable and gets better and better as it goes along, it is a bit unsettling to have a white character solve a riddle that involves Black people — as though Black people can’t untangle their own problems! That aspect of the novel is a little disconcerting, even though the times seemed to support the idea that Black people couldn’t represent themselves as witnesses in court — so there was a limited ability to rescue other Blacks through any sort of legal recourse. Still, while the characters are willy and unpredictable, and one of Adams’ kin can more than hold her own, it shouldn’t go unrecognized that the hero of this story is a young, white police officer in the newly minted “copper stars” of the NYPD. Never forget that fact as you read.
In any event, it is fun to catch up on characters introduced in The Gods of Gotham, here relegated mostly to more minor characters. The book, after all, is part of a series, so the characters are carried over throughout the narrative and any loose threads involving them are (presumably) tied up in the third and final book in the series, The Fatal Flame. It must be seven or eight years since I’ve read The Gods of Gotham, which was heavily promoted in Ottawa, Canada, bookstores back in the day, but I remembered most of these faces, even if I couldn’t remember names when I cracked open this one, so it can be said that Seven for a Secret can be read as a standalone work. That said, it will be much more particularly exhilarating if you’ve read The Gods of Gotham first. You do, after all, get a sense that Timothy Wilde is growing as a character, becoming much more jaded and cynical in this volume after having his hands tied (and sometimes literally!) at the roadblocks that he faces in solving this book’s crime.
The ending is a bit of a stretch, that much is for sure, and there’s a romantic angle carried over from the first book that sinks the energy a bit, but Seven for a Secret is an interesting and intoxicating read. It may not be Esi Edugyan or Colson Whitehead, least of all because it wasn’t written by a Black person, but Seven for a Secret is a good read if you’re looking to celebrate Black History Month in your special way. It certainly is a different kind of mystery book that is more exciting as much as it is perplexing — even if it is another example of historical fiction that mingles with historical truth — and this all just leads me to wonder how this series will end. Indeed, my appetite is whet to know the resolution to Timothy Wilde’s illustrious career as a genius cop. I guess I have another book to read.
Lyndsay Faye’s Seven for a Secret was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons on September 17, 2013.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
