Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers

This series still delivers adventures. For now I have read four of them. The first described previously is The Candlelight Murders, which has been followed by The Ring of Death, The Dead Man Smile and The Nest of Vipers lastly acquired during my stay in the UK. Volumes are rather unequal in quality but attachment to characters is a motivation sufficient enough to pursue book after book.

The first three books following the same pattern and narrative construction, it is then a good surprise to discover that the The Nest of Vipers bears some original writing. There is the usual introduction of the story by Robert Sherard; there he meets Oscar Wilde after he has come out of jail to announce him his will to publish a manuscript from an adventure involving HRH The Prince of Wales (next-to-become King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria). Sherard makes Wilde read it. At this point the reader comes and enters the story. Being at the moment only a manuscript, Brandreth has cleverly chosen to present his work as pieces: Robert's notes or Conan Doyle's, letters from husbands to wives, telegrams or extracts from diaries. In other words various documents in order to grasp hints, thoughts or facts. The reader is thus carried from a point of view to another which ads a sense of immediacy for the reader who is willingly taken into the story and in a way made to participate event though the final answers are given by Oscar, and Oscar alone, without any hint given before. Mystery must be preserved.

Reading this new adventure was somehow refreshing and to speak more about the plot in itself, it happens that The Nest of Vipers focuses on a death (not too surprisingly) in the context of hysteria, the famous nineteenth century illness. Not to mention fantasy (fangtasy if I dared) with vampires gravitating towards our heroes. Our curiosity is also arisen by the presence of the Prince of Wales. HRH involved with a death, how so? How shocking! How deliciously readable.