Victorian London comes to vivid life in this riveting heist novel about an all-female thieving gang and one young woman’s heroic plan to escape a life of crime.
She’s stolen gems, purses, and hearts—but can she steal her life back from the ring of thieves that’s claimed it?
London, 1879: Twenty-year-old Kit Jimeson has fingers so nimble she can nick a necklace off a lady in a crowded theater without raising alarm. Kit and her dodge partner, Mary, are the highest earners in the notorious all-women thieving ring in South London’s Elephant and Castle district.
Kit, whose mother had been a thief before her, dreams of a different life, one where she’s not constantly on the lookout for constables and plainclothes detectives, and where a mistake or pure bad luck won’t land her in the hangman’s noose. She has been saving her earnings so her younger sister, a maid for a wealthy Mayfair family, might have a shot at respectability.
Kit is very close to leaving the life entirely when the legendary former thief Maggie O’Connell brings her plans to a halt. Beautiful, charismatic Maggie has returned to reclaim leadership of the ring after twenty years in a brutal Australian penal colony. But Maggie desires more than mere wealth or power: She longs for revenge against those who sent her away. Kit, with her quick mind and dangerously clever hands, is Maggie’s best weapon. If Kit wants to walk away with her life, she must carry out a heist that will demand every skill she possesses.

My Review:

I’ll admit, I kind of expected this to be a play on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist because of the title. The “Artful Dodger” was a member of the thieving gang led by Fagin in the Victorian classic. It’s difficult not to think of Oliver while reading An Artful Dodge, as the Dodger was trying to recruit Oliver into the same kind of thieving ring that Kit Jimeson has been a member of for years.

But “The Ring” that Kit is such an integral part of is based on the real-life Forty Elephants, all-female thieving ring, which happened later in the Victorian era. Unlike Fagin’s gang of little pickpockets, “The Ring” relies on slightly more mature thieves. Kit wasn’t allowed to join the Ring until she was fourteen, and she’s been doing her best in the six years since to keep her younger sister Sarah as far out of it as possible.

One of the strengths of the story is that, in its deep immersion in its time and place, it doesn’t make moral judgments about the existence of the Ring or its necessity in allowing Kit and her fellow thieves to survive in a world that has few legitimate places for young women on their own. The Ring isn’t so much a choice as it is a chance for survival that is never exactly safe but is safer than being on her own after the loss of both her parents.

The Ring provides safe rooms, meals and even education. In return Kit thieves from shops catering to the gentry. Whether the shopkeepers can afford it or not isn’t the question. The question is whether they can afford it better than she can and the answer is always yes. It’s about survival, which means making a living wage at a time and place when other options were almost non-existent.

We see this world through Kit’s eyes at a time of change. Scotland Yard is taking property crimes like theft a lot more seriously than they used to – and they’re getting better at catching the thieves. Transportation to the Australian penal colonies is no longer an option, so thieves are either imprisoned or hung instead of ‘merely’ (definitely scare quotes there) transported.

Kit’s personal security is imperiled when the leader of the Ring who has been mentoring her for years is forced to step down by the daughter of the previous leader, just returned after 20 years of that transportation. Kit senses that something about the transfer isn’t right, she knows she can’t trust this new leader who came in with an old grudge against her, and her sister is in danger after witnessing a murder.

Kit’s world is closing in and there’s danger all around, even as she realizes that her oldest, deepest friendship has taken a turn towards romance she’s not certain she’s either able or ready to accept.

Which is where betrayal enters the scene, and things turn darkest. To protect everyone she loves, she’ll have to use every skill she has to escape the trap that her mother’s sins have dragged her into. Not knowing that someone else has planned better and further ahead.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up for two reasons. First, I really enjoyed both of the author’s historical mystery series, Victorian Mystery (A Dangerous Duet and A Trace of Deceit) and Inspector Corravan (Down a Dark River and Under a Veiled Moon). Second, my reading group LOVED An Artful Dodge and I hoped to do the same.

I did like it, but I didn’t love it the way I expected to. And part of that liking was certainly Anna Burnett’s excellent narration. But I’ve been trying to figure out why it didn’t grab me the way I thought it would ever since I finished.

Coincidentally, I was reading Heart of the Nile by Will Thomas as I was listening to An Artful Dodge. Both stories are set in the Victorian Era, although Thomas’ Barker and Llewelyn series is set nearly two decades after An Artful Dodge. Both stories are told in the first-person, Nile by private enquiry agent Thomas Llewelyn and Dodge by thief Kit Jimeson.

So we’re inside both of their heads and see their respective adventures through their eyes. But Heart of the Nile had me on the edge of my seat from the off, while An Artful Dodge, although it immersed me in its time and place every bit as much as Heart of the Nile, didn’t grab my attention and keep it as firmly in its grasp.

I’ve been pondering that difference for literally DAYS. I think the answer is that, although we see the world through their eyes and feel their emotions from inside, the pacing of An Artful Dodge is more than a bit slower. You’d think it wouldn’t be, as Kit is part of a thieving gang, danger is just as real and imminent for her – if not more so – than it is for Llewelyn, and there’s clearly betrayal on every single side.

But Kit describes every single thing and every person in exhaustive detail – as well as her own detailed thoughts and feelings about all of it. She worries, she ruminates, she mulls, she angsts. She doesn’t exactly repeat herself, but we get every detail of all of it, or so it seems. The story does a great job of describing her world in a great deal of detail, but the pacing drove me mad.

Llewelyn, on the other hand, definitely is not a stone or a stoic. He feels his feelings, he worries the case is putting his wife in danger, his boss drives half-insane, he spends a morning in jail on a point of his boss’s principle. He gets shot at more than once. But he doesn’t wring those emotions to death. And we still get the sense of time and place – enough but not TOO much, while he gets on with telling the story.

The idea of this book is fascinating, based a bit on the slightly later, but entirely real, Forty Elephants, a historical female thieving gang operating in the same Elephant and Castle area led by Alice Diamond. So fascinating, in fact, that there are two fictionalizations of Alice’s story in The Forty Elephants and Queen of Thieves, as well as other books set in or near the same era about completely fictional female gangs like Alex Hay’s The Housekeepers. There’s clearly a LOT of fascinating stuff to be mined both on this topic and in this period and I really hope authors keep on mining it.

This particular book, however, gets a LOT of points for the immersion factor. There’s a whole lot about the living and working conditions of the era, particularly for women but just the lack of opportunity for everyone in what were referred to as “the lower classes”. That information is wonderfully conveyed through the story without the story being in service to the lesson.

And I did like Kit as a character and rooted her to come out of this mess with a whole skin and a happy ending. I even empathized with how much she worried and ruminated, because there was a lot happening to her and around her, a lot of it was dangerous for her, her sister, the gang, and everyone she knew, and there were plenty of opportunities for dramatic tension.

But for this reader, that tension got muted by the slow pace of the story. As I already know that reading mileage varies on this one, for the legions of readers who enjoy stories that include in depth descriptions and perceptions, Kit’s ‘artful dodge’ of pretending to herself that everything will be fine when in her heart of hearts she half scared out of her mind – and with good reason – will undoubtedly keep those readers enthralled from beginning to end.