The Ladislaw Case


By: Imke Thormahlen
January 2012
Holmby Press
Distributed by Coronet Books
ISBN: 9789197694308
406 pages
$45.00 Paper original

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The Ladislaw Case is a whodunnit as well as a gripping psychological drama involving the key characters of George Eliot's Middlemarch. Ghosts are raised and laid to rest as Will tries to clear his name with the aid of his old friend Dr. Lydgate while both men struggle to escape the 'dead hand' of the past. In the end, they need the help of an expert on criminal and personal tangles: the now-retired Inspector Bucket, formerly of the Metropolitan Police Force (and Charles Dickens' Bleak House).

 

‘Imke Thormählen’s well-written whodunit The Ladislaw Case incorporates characters from George Eliot’s Middlemarch as well as Dickens’s Bleak House. In this novel, Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw becomes the prime suspect in the arsenic murder of his political opponent, Francis Courdroy. Ladislaw is aided by Dr Lydgate (also of Middlemarch) as well as Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket.’
                                                William Baker, Editor, The Year’s Work in English Studies

 

‘Thormählen writes very well, moves the plot along, and keeps the tension at just the right pitch throughout. She does a particularly good job extrapolating Eliot’s characters, convincingly making Ladislaw much less attractive than he is in Eliot’s novel and revealing the implications of Rosamond’s chilling egotism … Thormählen … has created an entertaining re-vision of a major Victorian novel [which] successfully extrapolates elements in [Middlemarch] that both illuminate and criticize [it].’
                                                George P. Landow, Editor-in-Chief, The Victorian Web

 

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