Blake and Avery

M. J. Carter’s Blake and Avery mysteries follow two mismatched investigators through the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign. William Avery is a conventional East India Company officer whose confidence in British institutions is repeatedly challenged, while Jeremiah Blake is a former Company political agent skilled in languages, disguise and intelligence work. The Strangler Vine sends them across Company-ruled India in 1837 to find a missing writer; The Printer’s Coffin reunites them amid murder and radical publishing in London in 1841; and The Devil’s Feast brings poisoning and diplomatic intrigue to the Reform Club in 1842.

Across the trilogy, criminal investigations expose the systems surrounding the crimes: colonial administration and the suppression of Thuggee, the divisions within Chartism and the struggle over a free press, and the political clubs, kitchens and diplomatic manoeuvring of early Victorian London. Carter uses Avery’s limited viewpoint and Blake’s scepticism to examine empire, class and institutional power, while their uneasy professional alliance develops into a friendship founded on argument, loyalty and shared danger.