The Stranger in the Asylum

by Alys Clare Book 4 in the World’s End Bureau Mysteries series.

First published 2024

Amazon

4.4(526)

London, April 1882. Phyllida asks Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham to investigate what happened to her fiancé Wilberforce, who was confined to an asylum in Brittany after his father’s death. Reports from the institution are troubling, and the case becomes more urgent when another death occurs and Wilberforce disappears.

Lily and Felix travel to rural France, where private medical authority and family control make it difficult to distinguish treatment from confinement. The mystery uses the Victorian asylum system, contemporary ideas about mental illness and the legal vulnerability of patients to examine how easily inconvenient people could lose control over their own lives.