Our favourite books this year, chosen by Orion editors...

Editor's Choice: Bill Massey chooses The Second Woman by Kenneth Cameron

Dear Reader,

Most great crime novels are just that: great crime novels. But occasionally one comes along that’s so good it reaches way beyond any mere genre. These are the ones that haunt us long after the last page has been turned, that change the way we think about things, the ones we simply call great novels. Kenneth Cameron’s The Second Woman belongs in that category.

Denton is an American author living in London in the 1900s. He fought in the American Civil War. He’s seen death close up. He also had a disastrous marriage that ended with his wife’s suicide. But if he came to England looking to escape humanity’s dark side, he chose the wrong place.

When a woman’s body is found in his back garden, it’s certainly a puzzle. But more mysterious than how she came to be there and who killed her is why officials from the ‘Home Office’ have elbowed the police aside and spirited the body away as if it never existed.

As the East End fills with refugees from the pogroms and fears of anarchist bomb plots take hold of the public imagination, Denton has his own very personal reasons for trying to identify the dead woman. But his pursuit of the truth will lead him into a deadly labyrinth, replete with horrors even he has not encountered before, as he finds himself caught up in the painful birth of Britain’s first secret intelligence service.

With its ingeniously crafted plot and rich cast of characters, this is crime-writing of the highest order. But Kenneth Cameron’s real achievement in The Second Woman is to bring a vanished world to startlingly vivid life while telling a story about freedom, secrecy and terror that is chillingly contemporary.

I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, you’ll be pleased to learn that there are already two other books to read featuring Denton (The Frightened Man and The Bohemian Girl), and more on the way. I would welcome your thoughts on all of them.

Yours sincerely

Bill Massey
Deputy Publishing Director,
Orion Books
© Orion 2009