Waif of the River

by Jeffery Farnol Book 8 in the Jasper Shrig Mysteries series.

First published 1952

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3.0(5)

A young woman rescued from the Thames brings a mystery involving a missing sister, dangerous pursuers and a network of crime that reaches beyond the riverbank. Her plight draws familiar figures from Farnol’s later Georgian stories into a case involving murder and embezzlement, while Jasper Shrig once again has to separate frightened testimony from deliberate deception.

The final Shrig novel combines the urban river, criminal conspiracy and romance with echoes of The Crooked Furrow and The Happy Harvest. The recurring characters give the mystery a sense of accumulated history, while Shrig’s methods remain rooted in Bow Street observation and patient reconstruction. Published in the year of Farnol’s death, it closes the detective sequence by returning personal loyalties to the centre of the investigation.