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Verdict: A genuinely atmospheric 1831 London mystery with a slow-burn sapphic romance the cover copy never mentions — let down by a second half that abandons its own grimy realism for coincidence and melodrama.
Best for: Readers who want Dickensian filth, a class-crossing romance built out of reading lessons, and a happy ending — and who will forgive a plot that stops behaving in its final third.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (1.5/5 — restrained and largely closed-door; romance.io does not catalogue it and assigns no steam band)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.3/5 — a 3.42 Goodreads average across 2,300 ratings, with one structural complaint raised by six independent reviewers)
Tropes: Historical mystery, class difference, teacher and pupil, slow burn, forbidden love, disguise and deception, body-snatching, orphan heroine, found family, happy ending.
The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin is a standalone 2018 debut — a historical mystery with a sapphic romance inside it rather than a genre romance — set in the London of 1831, where the poor are vanishing off the streets and nobody with any power has noticed.
It holds a 3.42 average across roughly 2,300 Goodreads ratings and 3.33 on StoryGraph, it was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2018, and it is by some distance the least-covered book on this list — no Kirkus, no Publishers Weekly, no Guardian, and no reviews at any of the dedicated sapphic book blogs. That absence is itself part of the story, and both halves of the split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is The Wicked Cometh About?
This is 1831 London, a very specific year, and the novel is built on a real panic. In the autumn of that year a Bethnal Green gang later called the London Burkers — John Bishop, Thomas Williams and their associates — were found to have been luring poor Londoners in, drugging them and drowning them in a well, then selling the bodies to anatomists. Bishop and Williams were hanged in December 1831 before a crowd reported at thirty thousand, and the case pushed Parliament into passing the Anatomy Act the following year. The disappearances at the centre of this book are that panic, fictionalised.
Hester White is the narrator: educated as a child by a country parson, orphaned into a Whitechapel hovel, and living with a family who have no use for her. An accident brings her under a carriage wheel and into the household of the wealthy Brocks, where Rebekah Brock is given the task of turning her back into a gentlewoman. The lessons are the engine of the book — a woman teaching another woman to pass — and the missing-persons investigation is what gives them somewhere to go. It is told in first person, present tense, in a heavy period register that readers either sink into or bounce straight off.
What Makes This Victorian Mystery Work
- The London: The most-praised element by a distance. Reviewers reach for Dickens repeatedly, and the descriptions of slum poverty, filth and cold are what people quote.
- The class writing: Hester moving between a Whitechapel cellar and a Mayfair drawing room, and being wrong in both, is the sharpest thing the book does.
- The slow burn: Several reviewers specifically praise how long the romance takes to declare itself — one describes it as something that simmers before it ignites.
- The real history underneath: The body-snatching panic is documented, dated and genuinely horrifying, and the novel does not need to invent anything to make it frightening.
- It gives them the ending: This is one of very few books on this list where two women get to be together and stay that way.
Book Synopsis
Hester White has come down in the world further than most people can imagine. Her father was a country parson who taught her to read Latin; she now lives in a Whitechapel slum with the Brimstocks, who took her in and have been resenting it ever since. People are disappearing from the streets around her — the poor, the drunk, the ones nobody reports — and Hester has begun to notice the pattern before anyone with the power to act on it does.
A collision with Calder Brock’s carriage changes her circumstances rather than her situation. She is taken into the Brock household in Chelsea, where Calder’s sister Rebekah is charged with the improbable project of educating her into respectability. Rebekah is clever, cold, faintly hostile, and the only person in the house who treats Hester as a mind rather than a problem. The lessons go on for months.
What Hester actually wants is to find the missing, and what she gradually understands is that the answer is closer to the house she is living in than to the streets she came from. The investigation pulls both women out of Chelsea and into places neither of them should be — and by then the question of what they are to each other has stopped being separable from the question of who they can afford to trust.
My Review
The first half of this book is much better than its reputation. Carlin writes filth extremely well — the cold, the hunger, the way a body smells in a room with no windows — and Hester’s double dislocation, too educated for Whitechapel and too poor for Chelsea, gives the whole thing a spine. The reading lessons are the best sequences in the novel: two women alone in a room with a book, the pretext getting thinner every week, and neither of them saying anything.
The romance is also handled with more patience than the length suggests. Several reviewers single out how gradual it is, and the class gap does real work rather than decorative work — Rebekah is teaching Hester to perform a station she will never actually hold, which makes every intimacy between them slightly false in a way both of them can feel. When it finally arrives, the payoff is earned, and this is one of the few books on this list where the two women get to keep each other.
Where it collapses is the back half, and this is the dominant complaint by a wide margin — six independent reviewers raise it, in almost identical terms. The book stops being a grimy, plausible mystery and becomes a melodrama running on coincidence, with a run of revelations that several readers describe as pantomime or as trope-stuffing. Four reviewers also say they guessed the central answer well before it arrived, against two who did not. Around that sit smaller objections: the present-tense narration divides people, with two calling it jarring against one who found it propulsive, and a couple of reviewers find the prose stilted or over-told. Rebekah takes real damage in the second half too — one reviewer complained she could not identify a single personality trait despite three hundred pages of Hester admiring her.
One expectation to set, because the packaging does not. The publisher’s own blurb describes this book purely as a mystery about London’s vanishing poor and does not mention a romance at all, let alone a sapphic one — it arrives as a mid-book turn. In practice most readers who find this book find it through queer shelves and know already, but if you came to it cold as a historical thriller, the love story is a genuine swerve. Amazon files it under LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction, which is more honest than the blurb.
My honest note: A strong debut that runs out of nerve in its last third and reaches for coincidence instead. Worth it for the London, the lessons and an ending that lets both women live — as long as you can shrug off a plot that stops behaving.
| Element | In The Wicked Cometh |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Hester White & Rebekah Brock — a slum orphan with a parson’s education and the woman hired to make her respectable |
| Core tropes | Historical mystery, class difference, teacher and pupil, slow burn, disguise and deception, body-snatching, orphan heroine |
| Setting | London, 1831 — Whitechapel slums, a Chelsea townhouse, and the year of the real London Burkers trial |
| Heat level | 1.5/5 — restrained and largely closed-door; romance.io does not catalogue it |
| Series | Standalone debut — no series and no sequel; the mystery resolves |
| Content notes | Murder and body-snatching, gore and body horror, animal cruelty and animal death, drug and alcohol abuse, kidnapping, extreme poverty, domestic abuse, grief, classism, homophobia |
How Explicit Is The Wicked Cometh?
A 1.5 out of 5, and this is among the most restrained books on this list. romance.io does not carry it at all, so there is no steam band to quote, and StoryGraph’s readers — a small pool of under two hundred reviews — log sexual content exactly once. What you get is longing, proximity and eventually tenderness, with the physical side almost entirely off the page. If explicit heat is what you want from a historical sapphic read, this is not the book; The Safekeep and Tipping the Velvet sit at the opposite end of the scale.
The content worth flagging is the crime rather than the romance. The body-snatching plot means dissection, corpses and the trade in them, and StoryGraph’s graphic tags — death, gore and animal cruelty, each logged by three readers — reflect a book that is unsentimental about what happens to bodies. Note that the warning data here is genuinely thin because so few readers have logged it; treat the absence of a tag as absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want Dickensian London done with real conviction, you like a slow burn that takes most of the book, you enjoy a class-crossing romance where the class gap actually matters, and you want a happy ending.
You may want to skip it if: heavy period pastiche in present tense will irritate you, you need a mystery that plays fair to the end, you want a fully developed love interest, or coincidence-driven melodrama is a dealbreaker.
In short: half a very good Victorian novel, an underwritten love interest, and one of the few happy endings in this whole subgenre.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
The most useful thing to report about this book is what does not exist. There is no Kirkus review, no Publishers Weekly, no Library Journal, no Booklist, and nothing from the Guardian, the Times or the Observer — this was a UK-only Hodder debut that never picked up trade coverage on either side of the Atlantic. Nor is there a single review at the Lesbrary, The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, Bookish Sapphic or Autostraddle, which is unusual for a book with a sapphic romance at its centre and is almost certainly a consequence of the marketing: the publisher’s blurb sells a missing-persons mystery and never mentions the relationship, so the sapphic review circuit never saw it coming. What it does have is a 2018 longlisting for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and a small, engaged blog following that discovered it through Goodreads shelves.
The audiobook is narrated by Sophie Ward for Hodder across 12 hours 50 minutes.
Prefer audio? Listen to The Wicked Cometh on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The atmosphere first — four independent reviewers reach for Dickens, and the Historical Novel Society praised the mix of mannered Victorian prose and vivid cockney dialogue. Then the slow burn, which four reviewers describe as organic and well paced, one specifically praising that it simmers rather than announcing itself. The class writing draws consistent credit. And a real minority is emphatic about the whole thing: one reviewer gave it five stars and named the happy ending as the reason.
What readers argue about and complain about: The second half, above everything — six independent reviewers say the book splits into two tonally different halves and that the back one runs on contrivance and coincidence, with one calling it a pre-rehearsed pantomime and another saying it crammed in every possible trope. Second: predictability. Four reviewers guessed the central answer early, against two who were genuinely surprised. Third: Rebekah, whom three reviewers find rushed or thin — the sharpest version is a complaint that she is never given a personality to justify Hester’s devotion, and it lands because we only see her from outside. Fourth: the present tense, which divides readers two-to-one against. And fifth, a smaller thread: two reviewers find the period prose stilted and over-told rather than immersive.
The standalone question worth asking first: this is a standalone, the mystery resolves, and the couple get an ending — though it is worth saying plainly that the happy ending is confirmed by only one reviewer who states it outright, with several others discussing the ending as divisive while carefully avoiding spoilers. If you want more Laura Carlin afterwards, there is exactly one further novel: Requiem for a Knave, a medieval historical published in 2020, rated 3.40 across only a hundred ratings, and it is not a sapphic romance. Nothing has followed it, so this is a two-book author with the better-known book first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Wicked Cometh a romance?
It has one, but it is not sold as one. The publisher’s blurb describes only a missing-persons mystery in 1831 London and never mentions the relationship, which arrives as a mid-book turn. Amazon shelves the book under LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction.
Does The Wicked Cometh have a happy ending?
Yes, as far as the available reviews go — Hester and Rebekah end the book together. It is worth noting that only one reviewer states this outright while others discuss the ending without spoiling it, so the evidence is thinner than for most books.
How explicit is The Wicked Cometh?
A 1.5 out of 5 — among the most restrained on this list, level with The Companion and The Animals at Lockwood Manor. The physical side is largely off the page, StoryGraph’s readers log sexual content just once, and romance.io does not catalogue the book at all.
Is The Wicked Cometh based on a true story?
The background is real. In 1831 a gang later called the London Burkers were found to have murdered poor Londoners and sold the bodies to anatomists; Bishop and Williams were hanged that December, and the case led to the Anatomy Act of 1832. The characters are invented.
Is there an audiobook of The Wicked Cometh?
Yes — narrated by Sophie Ward for Hodder, running 12 hours 50 minutes.
If You Loved The Wicked Cometh, Read These Next
Readers comparing this book to anything land on Fingersmith almost without exception — four independent reviewers named it, one calling this book Fingersmith Lite, which is unkind but tells you exactly what to read next. For the same class-crossing dynamic with far more heat and a picaresque energy, Tipping the Velvet is the obvious step up. And if the gothic-house version of this atmosphere is what you want, Affinity does Victorian dread with much tighter construction.
For more in this register, browse our books like Fingersmith guide, the historical sapphic romance reading list, or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
The Wicked Cometh is a debut that does its hardest work first. The 1831 London is convincing and genuinely unpleasant, Hester’s movement between two worlds gives the book a real subject, and the slow romance built out of reading lessons is more patient and better observed than most. It is also structurally lopsided, resolved through coincidence, narrated in a present-tense pastiche that will annoy as many readers as it charms, and built around a love interest who never quite comes into focus. Worth it if atmosphere and a happy ending matter more to you than a plot that holds. Check The Wicked Cometh on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, The Wicked Cometh ranks as a well-atmosphered debut historical mystery with a sapphic slow burn — vivid and patient in its first half, held back by a contrived second, and best approached for the London and the lessons rather than for the plot.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ 3.42 average across 2,300 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Authors’ Club Best First Novel longlist
- ✓ Six reviewers fault the second half
- ✓ No trade or sapphic-blog coverage at all
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ Genuinely slow burn across most of the book
- ✓ Class gap does real work in every scene
- ✓ Ends with the two women together
- ✓ Three reviewers call it rushed at the turn
Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ Hester is convincing in both worlds
- ✓ Her education is used, not decorative
- ✓ Secondary Whitechapel cast is vivid
- ✓ Rebekah is barely drawn from the inside
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Four reviewers reach for Dickens
- ✓ Slum detail is specific and unpleasant
- ✓ Cockney dialogue praised by the HNS
- ✓ Present tense divides readers two to one
Emotional Impact ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Poverty is written without sentiment
- ✓ The reading lessons carry real charge
- ✓ Real 1831 history gives it weight
- ✓ Melodrama undercuts the final stakes
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 1.5/5
- ✓ Longing rather than description
- ✓ Largely closed-door throughout
- ✓ romance.io does not catalogue it
- ✓ Sexual content logged once on StoryGraph
Ending ★★★☆☆ 3/5
- ✓ The couple get to stay together
- ✓ Mystery resolves with nothing pending
- ✓ Standalone with no sequel to chase
- ✓ Six reviewers call the route there contrived
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3/5
- ✓ First half rewards a second pass
- ✓ Sophie Ward’s narration is a good reread
- ✓ Short enough at under 350 pages
- ✓ A guessed twist loses its pull
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