This novella takes place between The Poisoner’s Ring and Disturbing The Dead and provides some adventure, as well as some backstory on one of the secondary characters of the series, Mallory’s fellow maid, Alice. Alice is the preteen pickpocket of the quote used in the title of this review, although she’s given up the pickpocket life, as she’s been taken under the wing of Isla.
In the before times of this series, when Mallory was living in 2019 and Catriona was living in 1869 and inhabiting her own body, Catriona was cruel to Alice. Now that Mallory is in residence in Catriona’s body, she is trying to rebuild the bridges that Catriona burned. Part of that is winning Alice over, while also keeping under wraps that she is a time traveller, and not just Catriona, who suffered a head injury and then got a whole lot nicer.
Possibly, Mallory should then respect Alice’s privacy and not follow after her when Alice sneaks out of the house after receiving a mysterious letter. But she does, because if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a plot here. Honestly, I get why Mallory would give chase to Alice. Mallory keeps reminding herself that she is in 1869 and so while Alice is a teenager, she’s got a lot of life experience. However, I, as the reader also keep thinking of Alice as a teenager, so you know in need of some adult supervision at times, so I was able to easily buy into Mallory’s decision to follow Alice.
She ends up tracking Alice down to a “dance hall” which actually is a lot more sinister than a simple dance hall. Alice ran with some rough characters, and so did Catriona whose past comes back to haunt Mallory a bit in this installment.
I’m interested in (soon, soon I hope!) diving into Disturbing The Dead and seeing if any of the events of this novella have an impact on that one. The novella notes that Mallory is still working as a maid, although they are trying to hire for that position and small spoilers, but the novella doesn’t change that status quo. I did really enjoy this little glimpse into Alice’s backstory, and some more hints at some of the schemes that Catriona got up to.
While I did enjoy the first two books in this series, one of my complaints about them was that while there is always a lot going on, I don’t always find myself glued to the page. The books are enjoyable to me, but more of a pick it up and put it down kind of read. I found the novella format worked much better for me, yes, there was a fair bit going on, but it was in a shorter, more compact format and the plot moved along at a much quicker pace. This was also to be fair, a little less about mystery solving and more about adventure having, so if the mysteries of the main series are the draw for a reader I don’t know if they would enjoy this one as much as I did.