Much like book one of the Florence Nightingale Mystery series, I feel A Murderous Malady best suited to the mystery crowd. Trent is a creative storyteller, but this is not biographic fiction and shouldn’t be recommended as such.

As far as content goes, A Murderous Malady has a lot going for it. The Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854 affords more insight to Nightingale’s nursing than was seen in No Cure for the Dead, but as much as I liked the material, I couldn’t help feeling it removed from the whodunnit at the heart of the narrative.

As far as the whodunnit is concerned, I was impressed by the angle. The end-all reminded me a bit of The Rock (1996), but I thought the material paired nicely with both the politics of the day and Nightingale’s career path. Purists might be a little perturbed at the liberties taken, but I found the fiction entertaining in its own way.

I felt the resolution had a lot of working parts and I’d have liked more cohesion between the mystery and Nightingale’s primary profession, but all in all, I enjoyed the time I spent with this book and would have no problem recommending it to fans of historical mysteries.