Twelve Minutes to Midnight

This is a clever Victorian romp, fast paced and very readable.  Penny Tredwell is the owner of the best selling magazine ‘The Penny Dreadful’ in which the stories are written by her but she has to use Montgomery Flinch to front this as a female writer would not be accepted in Victorian England.  The twentieth century is just about to arrive when Penny receives word of weird happenings at Bedlam, the notorious mental asylum.  With Monty she visits the asylum and sees a heavily veiled woman leaving, and finds the inmates busily frenetically writing what appears to be nonsense, starting always at twelve minutes to midnight.  These writings it will be clear to the reader, are foretelling the future, such events as 9/11, man into space and so on.  The key to these weird events is the veiled lady and she turns out to have a dream- weaver spider which emits venomous liquid which when given to the inmates causes them to write of the future and Lady Cambridge, (interesting choice of name!), hopes to cash in on such visions.  Eventually writers such as Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard are caught up in the story which is satisfactorily brought to a rather terrifying conclusion.

This is not a book for readers afraid of spiders, as there are some very graphic descriptions of them, large and small, and very venomous, but it is a cleverly woven web of events with a feisty heroine, a devoted sidekick in Alfie and a dark and brooding atmosphere.  Readers will like trying to identify the events being foretold and the presence of writers like H G Wells with his books being mentioned adds depth and interest to the story.  There are more stories about Penny in the pipeline, hopefully for this reviewer, not all about spiders!