Reviews for The Devil's Company (Benjamin Weaver Series #3)

The average rating for The Devil's Company (Benjamin Weaver Series #3) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-23 00:00:00 Lonnie Albright I'm a big fan of Benjamin Weaver, the Jewish prize-figher turned "thief taker," who is the hero of David Liss's The Devil's Company, the third in the series of crime novels set in 18th century London. (The other two are The Whiskey Rebels and A Conspiracy of Paper.) Liss writes as Weaver, in the first person, in a pitch-perfect and convincing blend of contemporaneous slang and syntax with readable modern English. The author has a remarkable ability to evoke the stinking, muddy streets of a pre-sanitary city, along with the drawing rooms and bedrooms of both elegant mansions and slum dwellings, and the dreary business offices peopled by slavish clerks and scheming bosses. It's a world teeming with the human race, with all its foibles and prejudices as well as its occasional nobility and generosity of spirit. Weaver is a marvelous character. Honest to a fault, he's perfectly willing to cut corners and take risks in what he perceives to be the pursuit of justice. Loyal to his friends, he's the most implacable of enemies. He sides with the poor and the downtrodden--and there are many of those, in the metropolis--against the unscrupulous rich and the privileged upper classes. At once tender and tough, he will go to any lengths to right the wrongs that he unearths. His partners-in-crime-solving--and also, often enough, in crime--are a colorful bunch of characters, as, indeed, are the villains he exposes. But Liss is after more than the historical context. The East India Company--the "devil's" company--is a stand-in for the rapacious corporations that threaten to dominate today's world. The interplay between commerce and politics is at the center of the book's complex and engrossing intrigues. In his metaphors for today's society, Liss takes the view of a liberal of the realist persuasion. "Companies," he writes on the one hand, in the words of one of his characters, "concern themselves only with how much money they can make. Governments at least look after the well-being of all--the poor, the unfortunate, and even the laborers, whose work must be cultivated, not exploited." But later, another character adds this relativist wisdom: "Politics cannot always be about what is moral and right and good for all men and all time. It must be about what is expedient now, and what is the lesser evil." There's much other meat on the bone of plot in this novel, including much social observation about class and prejudice which is unfortunately as true today as the author makes it sound in the eighteenth century. Above all, there's the spirit of adventure, the not-knowing what we're going to find around the next dark corner, the craftily handled suspense. And the humor, sometimes subtle, sometimes slapstick, sometimes laugh-out-loud. Action? Sure, if you fancy a phaeton chase through the streets of London, as fast-paced and reckless as a roman chariot race--or the conventional chase scene in any contemporary movie. Oh, and fisticuffs, for sure... The book is a barrel of intelligent, good-humored fun.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-17 00:00:00 John Macmillan Set in London in the year 1722, the scenery might be the point of the novel; yet, David Liss manages to create memorable and individual characters that actually carry the day. Our hero, a retired boxer of Portugese-Jewish ancestry, is also a master of disguise and a wry wit. His sidekick is a lounge lizard Lothario of a surgeon, always ready for another glass of wine. The dialogs in the story were perhaps a strong point: the exchanges were natural, but sharp and informative. There is a strong sense of how information is uncovered when it's worked in such a way, the result keeps us on track, and there was less a sense (as there is in some whodunnits) that the author is hiding relevant clues. The tangled plot involved espionage, technology, and the East India Company. My favorite scene involved the crashing of a gay club. The historical research was a highlight of the whole story, and the author's refusal to portray clichés of historical fiction, and instead emphasize the complexity of history.