Murder on tour

“The man knows his meat,” a London police inspector says of a slaughter man’s grisly discovery in Stephen Gallagher’s new novel, “The Kingdom of Bones” (Shaye Areheart: 370 pp., $24.95). What the slaughter man finds in a sorting vat isn’t cattle offal but the remains of a pauper child, one of many similar slayings that puzzle police in this swift-moving supernatural thriller.

Using that familiar commandment of thriller writers -- misdirect, misdirect, misdirect -- Gallagher doesn’t make it clear why these vicious crimes occur in the wake of a 19th century theater company’s tour of the British Isles. All we know is that the company’s aging actor-manager Edmund Whitlock and his protege James Caspar -- “a talent for darkness has brought you this far,” Whitlock tells him -- are up to no good. Set against them is another pair: Tom Sayers, a former boxer and now the company’s business manager, and Sebastian Becker, the police inspector. Becker and Sayers expend an enormous amount of energy chasing each other -- Sayers has been framed for several gruesome discoveries -- before the occult nature of their true enemy is revealed with the aid of Bram Stoker.

That’s right, the author of “Dracula” plays a helpful role here, providing Sayers and Becker with useful contacts to people with a thorough knowledge of dark, arcane rites. In the children’s murders they find signs of a legendary figure known by many names in world mythology, including Ahasuerus, or the Wanderer, one “who trades his soul for prolonged life and forbidden knowledge,” Stoker explains. His fluency in supernatural matters surprises his acquaintances, but of course we know better. When Stoker tells everyone “my interests [in the occult] have been entirely academic,” note the year in which Gallagher situates these incidents, 1889: Stoker’s great vampire novel would be published eight years later. Academic, indeed.

Having a master of gothic horror appear in your thriller is a shrewd strategy: Gallagher’s treatment of Stoker seems fair to real-life accounts of him. Having him lumber along also adds literary richness to a story that moves a little too much like a modern thriller despite the weight of its Victorian clothing.

-- Nick Owchar

nick.owchar@latimes.com