Chris Nickson’s Gods of Gold is a wonderfully atmospheric murder mystery set in Leeds, England in 1890. Tom Harper is a police detective who has aspirations for upward mobility and personal happiness — he is engaged to Annabelle Atkinson, a young widow entrepreneur, who clearly deserves her own mystery series.

However, Gods of Gold belongs to Tom Harper, who tries to find a missing girl and solve some nasty murders in the face of political corruption and a nasty labor strike. Despite power brokers who are more concerned with the controlling the strike and preserving their particular version of “the peace,” Harper keeps working his cases and trying to find the girl. He may not be brilliant, but he has worked his way up to a good position. Risk aversion is alien to many murder mystery detectives, so it is interesting to see how Harper nudges and works the system and tries to stay out of too much trouble. He takes risks, but he also attempts to manage those risks, both to himself and to those around him. Incidentally, the characters around Harper are particularly well written — the supporting cast is strong.

Gods of Gold offers police work in a different age. Class distinctions are important, and forensic science has barely scratched the surface. Yet the politics of career survival for a detective who wants to triage his own work load rings very true.

Chris Nickson does a magnificent job of describing nineteen century Leeds. The grim poverty presided over by corrupt and “respectable” local power brokers is keenly observed. Still, there is time to appreciate what it meant to be a young man working his way up without benefit of an education. I also loved Annabelle Atkinson, Harper’s fiancée and her ambitions.

I liked this book, and hope to read more Tom Harper books. Gods of Gold is the first of a series of six mysteries, by a very prolific writer who not only writes other detective series, but seems to have spent much of the 1990’s writing celebrity biographies.