The Glass of Time »

Michael Cox (1948 - 2009) was the biographer of the ghost-story writer and scholar M. R. James. His first novel, The Meaning of Night, was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa First Novel Award.

Building on his "superb" (Washington Post) debut, The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox returns to a murderous nineteenth-century England.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

…[an] entirely wonderful mock Victorian novel, written in something like the style of Alice's favorite writer, Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. It's a melodrama, of course, chock-full of revenge, romance, duplicity, concealed identities and murder most frequent—but melodrama on a grand scale. By any sensible standard, Englishman Michael Cox's convoluted plot is somewhere between outrageous and preposterous. Few characters are who or what they seem, and one key figure has five distinct identities. And yet the novel's fierce suspense and endless surprises, burnished by Cox's gorgeous prose, make it irresistible.