Assessment:

Plot/Idea: Crab Bait is a striking Mystery/Thriller set in 1888 London, where an infamous male escort has been murdered, and the suspects are many. Scotland Yard Detective Oscar Glass is under internal and external pressures to solve the case even as the body count increases, as does the killer's savagery.

Prose: Brennan's prose is lush, lyrical, and hard-hitting, and he wastes no time getting to it: "An away place from the gut-fuck of the New World’s Gilded Age." His descriptions are haunting and often, despite the brutal scenes, poetic.

Originality: As a mystery, Crab Bait is singular, not least because of its sinister title and all it implies. The victim, a "beautiful creature", looms large on every page, a good trick as he's dead before the book begins. Oscar Glass, too, isn't your stereotypical Scotland Yard detective, but a complicated man with very real demons. The author is fearless, pulls no punches, and shows the reader an intoxicating, filthy, gorgeous, world and all trapped in it.

Character/Execution: Brennan's characters are well-drawn, complicated, and distinct, almost to a fault; the reader knows so much about them, it's difficult to find heroes in this tale of sex, hustling, murder, and obsession. 

Date Submitted: August 29, 2024

Brennan (Loose Lips) impresses with this atmospheric whodunit set against the backdrop of Jack the Ripper’s killing spree in 1888 London. Rather than the mean streets of Whitechapel, however, Brennan focuses on “the golden age of the gentleman’s club,” the most notorious of which is Sizar’s, an establishment whose members are “soilingly, ruinously ungentlemanly” in their sexual proclivities. Stewart Marsh, who scouts young men willing to have sex with Sizar’s members, is on holiday in Brighton when he stumbles on the drowned corpse of London escort Marty Piper. Marsh’s gruesome find soon comes to the attention of Det. Insp. Oscar Glass, who investigates London’s gentleman’s clubs for criminal activity. While Glass struggles to narrow the list of suspects—Piper accrued plenty of enemies as a “boy-whoring master villain”—he’s handed a second, possibly connected murder to solve. Brennan’s reveals, when they come, are plenty shocking, but the narrative’s main strength is its vivid portrayal of a segment of Victorian society rarely depicted in mysteries. This illuminates a dark corner of British history, with grimly satisfying results. (Self-published)

Kirkus Reviews

“A series of grisly murders disrupts Victorian London’s covert gay scene in Brennan’s historical thriller. … Brennan has constructed an immersive puzzle, one that delights in shattering Victorian facades of class and propriety with sex and blood. … a fascinating look into the strange, lost world [of] gentleman’s clubs and the young men ensnared in their customs.

A rich, dark mystery set in repressed 19th-century London.”