Addison/Monette is an excellent writer of friendships, and in particular of scenes where awkward and traumatized people find that they have built up enough trust that they can risk having honest conversations about what they mean to one another and how to be good to one another. That's one of the things I'm hoping to find when I pick up her books, and The Angel of the Crows does deliver it. On the other hand, it's a novel about the Jack the Ripper murders in which (to my recollection) no sex worker gets any dialogue, and the sympathetic characters who talk about the victims and their community all do so with a tutting, dismissive pity that gets startlingly ugly in places.

I liked this enough to finish it, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.