Missing girls

Will Thomas lives in Oklahoma, but you'd never guess that reading his Barker & Llewelyn novels, which are set in a London during Victorian times and seem to reflect very well that time and place.
In The Hellfire Conspiracy, the fourth novel in the series published in 2007, Cyrus Barker is hired to locate a 12-year-old girl who has disappeared in the city's East End while her mother had been doing volunteer work for an agency that serves the poor. She is but one of a number of girls who disappear each year in London, mostly to be forced into prostitution. But lately girls have been turning up dead. Soon the body of this girl is found.

For Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, that doesn't mean the case is over. They redouble their efforts to try to save the lives of other girls.

As usual, Thomas sprinkles actual historical persons into his story, which conforms with events that were actually taking place in England at that time. Those with an interest in British history will have fun separating fact from fiction. Most of us won't care but will just enjoy the action. And there is plenty of that.