Curious Toys

Historical Thriller with The Alienist and The Devil in the White City influences.

The story hinges on Pin, a fourteen-year-old girl who disguises herself as a boy for greater safety and freedom as she runs around Chicago's Riverview amusement park in 1915.

Hand creates a gritty, big city vibe for her historical Chicago. Pin is in a world of sexual predators, including a fictional version of Charlie Chaplin (who liked to marry ‘em young in real life.) The stage is set for a serial killer who preys on girls around Pin's age.

Pin becomes involved in the hunt for this killer in multiple ways. First, she has an unresolved backstory of a missing sister. Next, she is the first to find a body of one of the victims and inadvertently points the finger at the wrong person.

In her investigations to find the killer, she runs across a disturbed young man named Henry (based on real-life artist Henry Darger) who claims to be a protector of young women, also trying to find the killer. Hand does a good job of creating distrust and tension between these two eventual allies. Unfortunately, when they begin to work together, the reader never gets a sense of why their initial wariness blossoms into supposed friendship.

The viewpoint changes often during the book, including the killer's thought process as he goes around the city and back to his rooms where he performs an unusual ritual with the items he takes from the victims. Including this view actually makes him less menacing and it didn't add any insight.

The mystery aspect revolves around a very compact cast of characters, which seems unlikely to me in a city the size of Chicago. There's a lot of coincidence to move the plot and up the stakes which is not my favorite tactic and tends to break the immersion for me.

This was a pretty decent read, but not as spectacular as I was expecting. The premise had more promise that it delivered.