Late Victorian London. When the most respectable of Scottish businessmen is pulled, dead, from the Thames, his daughter is drawn into an investigation which reveals a whole world of secrets and corruption and leads all the way to the tragic truth behind the ghostly legend of The Darkwater Bride – in an epic drama combining the genres of the Victorian mystery thriller with the equally classic Victorian mode of the ghostly tale.
Rachel Atkins, Amy Cooke-Hodgson, Clare Corbett, Stephen Critchlow, Donal Finn,Jamie Glover, Peter Gold, Joel Gorf, Chris Grahamson, Edward Harrison, David Holt, Frances Jeater, Yolanda Kettle, Fiz Marcus, Freya Mavor,Gerard McDermott, Nina Millns, James Parkes, Richard Reed, Adrian Scarborough, Lizzie Stables, Mark Straker, Ben Whitehead, Sarah Whitehouse and Sarah-Louise Young.
This is a great premise for a spooky season story, and you can tell the author is drawing from some of the greats of Victorian gothic and supernatural literature. The radio-style production is great fun at moments. And it tackles some difficult questions in the way it looks at the violence men and society have done to women—especially poor and desperate women.
Unfortunately, the pacing gets bogged down by multiple characters’ tendency to speechify when they should be acting. And dear god the final confrontation between Katriona and goes on entirely too long.
A suspenseful mystery with a dash of supernatural, this story follows a young woman in search of the truth of how her father, a respectable businessman, was found dead near the Darkwater Bridge in the turn of the century London. In doing so, she uncovers a damping truth not just of her father's "business trips", but also the Soho slums and a phantom figure only referred to as the Darkwater Bride.