Book Log 2009 #2 and #3: The Black Tower and Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard

I was kind of on the fence about The Black Tower, which revisits the mystery around France's Lost Dauphin, mostly due to relative indifference about French history. Thankfully, the book avoids most of the court intrigue you might expect and gives plenty of time to the main character, a struggling young doctor, and the criminal turned detective Vidocq (creating a good riff on the Holmes and Watson dynamic). There's also a bit of family drama, as the young doctor learns more about his father, a doctor turned lens grinder.

The father and son relationship is also a significant feature of Mr. Timothy, which follows a now grown-up Timothy Crachit, who is living in a house of ill repute in exchange for providing certain services to the madam (just not the ones you might expect). He struggles with the strained bonds of his family (parents and several siblings dead, and in infrequent contact with those still living), and chafes at the continued reliance on "Uncle N" for financial support. The discovery of two young girls, dead and branded with the letter G, sets him on a quest to figure out what happened to them.

Both books are filled with lavish period detail and characters strong enough not to be smothered by it. Mr. Timothy is a bit less action-oriented than The Black Tower, but makes up for it with peeks into the lives and history of the Crachit family. Both are well recommended.