Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Storm Publishing, and author Emily Organ for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

With numerous requests for reviews, I have discovered several authors I really enjoy who I did not know of a year ago. One of those is Emily Organ. I first came upon her writing in Limelight and decided to try her other works. What I didn’t know going into this book is that it builds on the characters that were in Limelight and other books in that series, centered around a female journalist in the late 19th century by the name of Penny Green. Yes, Penny Green is back in The Whitechapel Widow. Now a wife and a mother, she’s been limited by trying to do everything at a time when married women weren’t supposed to have careers.

Emma Langley and her husband, William, are on a train in Liverpool Station. They are about to embark on a new life in Suffolk, where William has relatives. William tells Emma he needs to step off the train for a moment, and vanishes. Emma goes back and forth to Suffolk, where she learns no one heard of William’s Aunt, nor the house she supposedly lived in. Frustrated, Emma returns to London. However, she has no home to return to and no money with her to rent a room. Her former landlords are sympathetic and take her in.

Emma begins to search for her husband, whom she considers missing at this point. There are hints that Emma didn’t know William as well as she thought she did. Desperate for answers, she turns to Penny Green (now Penny Blakely), who helped Emma out years before when her brother was murdered. Now a wife and mother, Penny has been trying to do it all at home while her husband, Scotland Yard Detective James Blakely, has urged her to hire some help around the house and to care for their two children. The mystery of Emma’s spouse intrigues Penny enough to the point that she hires a housekeeper/Nanny in short order so she can work on the mystery of who William Langley really is and what happened to him.

Penny and Emma bond as friends. Along the way, they are treated poorly by just about everyone. The police dismiss them as being too emotional and delicate. When William’s body turns up, it’s all the more of a mystery, but the police are dealing with the Jack the Ripper murders at the same time, so they aren’t all that concerned about William’s murder.

I really enjoyed The Whitechapel Widow for a variety of reasons. Everyone keeps telling Penny she has to think differently about the world now that she’s a wife and mother. Even her former boss at the newspaper, The Morning Express, tells her he can’t have a wife and mother working for the paper. He misses her input, though, acknowledging that she was a good reporter and valuable to the newspaper. It’s just that at the time, he would have faced backlash had he kept her on. He does make Penny an offer to be an “ad hoc contributor,” which leaves it open for Penny to write for the paper here and there. It’s a boon to her. Although dedicated to her family, Penny doesn’t like being cooped up in the house with the children all the time. Luckily, she also has a husband who is supportive of her need to do more than laundry and cook (which she also isn’t apparently that good at).

The mystery was very good, with enough red herrings all along that it kept me guessing. I went back and forth on what the reasoning was behind William’s death as well as his abandonment of Emma. Emily Organ writes enough about various characters’ actions and thoughts that Emma doesn’t see that it creates suspicion just about everywhere. There’s even the question of William having been Jack the Ripper, although Emma finds that hard to believe. Still, the killings stop after his death…

The Whitechapel Widow is the start of a series where Penny and Emma team up. Having gotten to know Penny already, I like seeing a charismatic, determined woman not get put on the shelf, even when the social mores of the time limited what she could do. Having her team up with Emma gives them both a brighter future. Emma is far from a dumb woman, even if she did fall for a man who lied to her from the beginning. They make a great team, and I look forward to future works involving these two.

Next book in the series: