Book talk led by Dano Cammarota, this year devoted to historical fiction. This week’s selection is The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) by Charles Dickens.

The last and unfinished novel of Dickens, Drood portrays the quiet cathedral town of Cloisterham as a dark place of violence, suspicion, deceit and even murder; nothing is as it seems. Within the backdrop of the Church, Dickens utilizes the realism of his time to explore the essence of evil, revealing a society on the verge of extinction. It is not merely Edwin Drood who disappears, it is the Empire itself.