Stephen Cox
Self-published, 1 September 2025
Available as: PB, 394pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781068164408
I'm grateful to Anne and Stephen for sending me a copy of The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
Stephen Cox has previously written a heartwarming two part SF story Our Child of the Stars/ Our Child of Two Worlds about the arrival of an orphaned alien child, the humans who take him in, and the difference that makes to the world's future. He's one of those authors that I was keenly waiting for more from, so I was pleased to see The Crooked Medium's Guide forthcoming, something in quite a different vein but still - I'd say - with a sense of family, of community, at its heart and still told from the perspective of the underdog.
Mrs Ashton is though, at first, a hard underdog to like! She is the crooked medium of the title, a convinced Spiritualist but a fraud who does NOT converse with spirits, though she has another gift, the ability to "open up" subjects and read their minds. This enables her, often, to perceive enough to convince. Sometimes, she can do genuine good, but her willingness to break into minds without consent is troubling to put it mildly.
As is her willingness to pilfer, forge and leave a trail of debtors behind.
Mrs Ashton is aided in her endeavours by the formidable Mrs Bradshaw - Braddie - a Scot who's often exasperated, and often willing to give unpalatable advice, which is generally ignored. She regards the risks that Mrs Ashton runs as unconscionable, and her gloomy warnings prove wise over the course of this novel.
The two women are lovers, something that must, in the high Victorian age, be kept as the strictest secret, and Cox is good on both their physical relationship and the strain that this necessary discretion places on their relationship. There are some touching passages here, especially where he shows us Mrs B worrying over Mrs A, her "hinny" and recognising how she's being manipulated by the other woman.
The third member of the detective trio (as it turns out to be) is Maisie, a poor girl with a difficult family who acts as the other womens' bodyguard, spy and general fixer. Maisie is sharp and cynical, with a host of connections and contacts in the East End - and she's having none of Mrs Ashton's nonsense.
While a lengthy history of close brushes with the law is implied, putting the two older women at odds with a hostile Press and police, the central action in The Crooked Medium's Guide concerns an aristocrat, Lady Violet, who comes to Mrs Ashton for help with her abusive husband Sir Charles Barrington-Stewart, a rising MP. Though warned by Braddie to have no part of the affair, Ashton refuses to drop it and follows the Barrington-Stewarts to their country house where, naturally, murder follows.
From this point the book is in whodunnit mode as Ashton and Braddie race to clear their name, while a distinguished Scotland Yard detective has the opposite intention. I loved the complexity of the resulting situation, which takes in the closed society of the Big House, previous crimes that Sir Charles may or may not have committed, and a perplexed spirit who - to her horror - begins appearing to Mrs Ashton. None of the information adds up, Mrs Ashton's creditors are circling and a key witness has disappeared.
I think that credible and interesting stories often follow from characters in tight situations, people subject to constraints, and with Mrs Ashton especially, Cox gives us this in abundance. As if being a woman isn't enough in patriarchal Victorian society, Mrs Ashton is already suspected of fraud and of not paying her debts; her Spiritualism puts her at odds with the Establishment, and the loyal servants of Corwood Manor are suspicious. We are also shown hostile press accounts of her doings - clearly the crooked medium is newsworthy.
Yet she continues, winning over a person here, a person there, deploying her gift of "opening up", latching onto what little actual evidence there is and pursuing a shrewd series of deductions as to what really happened. Perhaps not likeable at first, Mrs Ashton - and her accomplices - did bring me round in a story that's mysterious, driven and, above all, great fun to read.
While most of the action is seen from the viewpoint of Mrs Ashton, and the story is always at its most vivid then, there are sections shown for example from the perspective of the detective or one of the Corwood servants and also from Maisie's. We also get to see a number of others representing something of the diversity of the Victorian Metropolis - I hope and expect that Cox is planning further episodes in this world because while some of the characters we meet, such as Dongmei Li and her family, fascinate they don't appear much - I hope they're being set up for future episodes.
For more information about The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder see the author's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below.
You can buy The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.
