The Streets Of Babylon is another welcome entry to the increasingly crowded historical crime genre. Resembling a less dense Sarah Walters novel, TSOB is an enjoyable romp through the underbelly of Victorian London at the height of Empire.

It is 1851 and successful Swedish crime author, Euthanasia Bondeson, has just arrived in London with her beautiful niece, Agnes, to visit the Great Exhibition. The London they step into is the centre of the world, a teeming metropolis with the extremes of wealth and poverty rubbing up against each other at every turn.

Euthanasia is independent and determinedly single. Although self-contained, she and Agnes cheerfully become wide-eyed tourists taking in the sights and sounds of what they see as the muscular capital of the world. These sights include the huge Exhibition itself but also the aristocratic, artistic salons of Mayfair as well as the hovels and slums of Whitechapel, St Giles and Spitalfields. When on a trip to the British Museum the beautiful Agnes goes missing and subsequently turns up dead in the Thames, Euthanasia resolves to find out what happened.

So far so good. Euthanasia is a singular character whose irascibility falls just the right side of likeability. The device of strangers in a strange land is a good one and the cavalcade of exotic professors, ennobled artists, secretive vicars, whores, beggars and stolid policemen is as enjoyable here as it is in most other novels set in the period. It is no great surprise when Dickens and Wilkie Collins make a cameo appearance. Indeed lots of detail is dropped into the action, mostly to its benefit, but occasionally you can tell Carmina Burman is an academic and that she displays her erudition a tad too willingly.

No matter, the story is a good one, albeit not hugely original (as recently as last month City of Dark Hearts was not entirely dissimilar). The tone is just the right side of romp and The Streets of Babylon may be considered the first entry in another series worth looking out for.

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