In The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hauser (Missing) delicately weaves together Dickens's well-known history with an imagined tale of mystery, murder and romance. The novel opens in 1870--the year Dickens died--as the ailing author sits down to write his final story, a tale he lived himself in the early years of his career and kept secret until this point.
Hauser sets most of the action in the early 1830s, just as Dickens's early collection Sketches by Boz began to gain notoriety and he was becoming a household name in England and beyond. The young man is called on to write a sketch of a powerful businessman, Charles Wingate, who purports to be the most honest of investors. As Dickens digs deeper into Wingate's past, however, he finds not the honest history he has been promised but a string of suspicious murders, falsified wills and a brutal attack against a prostitute that left her scarred and destitute. He also finds himself falling in love with Wingate's wife, Amanda, though his own wedding day is rapidly approaching.
Hauser has taken some liberties with Dickens's timeline, but has also included key biographical details--such as his unhappy marriage to Catherine Hogarth--that will delight devoted students of the writer. What is even more delightful is how truly Dickensian Hauser's novel proves to be, exploring not only this imagined incident but also the real man's favorite themes of London life and class inequalities. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm