Book Review: The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell

Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp is at a crossroads in his life. Recently dumped by his elegantly French girlfriend Heloise, he’s taken up self-improvement, including long jogs on nearby Hampstead Heath. It’s while on one of these punishing attempts at fitness that he discovers the corpse of a socialite, dressed in finery and vomit, in the bushes. It might just be a case of death by misadventure except for the brutal and deliberate knife slash across the young woman’s throat.

The deceased turns out to be Clemmie O’Hara, an influencer and wannabe photographer who worked at an art gallery but whose lifestyle seemed to be primarily financed by her moneyed boyfriend Rupert. The lord-in-waiting stands to inherit both great wealth and a title, so of course he decided to throw an excessive bash for his thirtieth birthday the night before in a Kentish Town McDonald’s. Clemmie had not deigned to show up, and Rupert had assumed that she was just making a point given his continued refusal to ask her to marry him. Turns out that she had been very dead instead.

Rupert’s friends and hangers-on are all very quick to alibi him, but Caius suspects that he’s far more involved than anyone is letting on. Caius also knows that he has to work quickly, as the more he uncovers, the more likely the case will be taken away from him. Letting justice be snatched away again by the system was not, after all, why he joined the police force in the first place:

Every time Caius tried to ask his paternal grandfather about his childhood in Jamaica, the normally talkative man clammed up. He remembered telling his father and grandfather that he was joining the police and how disappointed they’d been with him. They didn’t seem to understand that after everything they’d been through, everything that had happened to his sister, Lydia, he felt compelled to. That if someone like him was doing the job then it wouldn’t happen again. His father said he could join his property company[,] while his grandfather had tried to insist that Caius use his degree to go into a more gentlemanly profession, not the thuggery of the police.

Driven by his beliefs, Caius is determined to leave no stone unturned, leading him to cross paths with Nell Waddingham, a frenemy of both Rupert and Clemmie’s. Nell and Rupert have long had the unfortunate habit of being unable to stay out of each other’s romantic lives, to Clemmie’s prior poorly disguised jealousy. Nell wants to end things with Rupert for good, and feels encouraged to do so with the support and attention of another of their university friends, Alex. But Rupert is relentless in his pursuit, and Nell doesn’t know how to stay away from him. As she muses:

Men may appear, proverbially, to arrive all at once. However, the real question is: why aren’t men more like buses? By virtue of their scale and colour, buses are obvious. Unlike men who only make themselves obvious years later. The new buses even have multiple exit routes, unlike men. Bus shelters have little displays that tell you in real time when each bus arrives at your stop, and there are maps that tell you where each service terminates, unlike men. Who made men so careless that they afford you less consideration than [transport to London]?

Even as Nell attempts to unravel her tangled feelings, she finds herself drawn into the investigation into what really happened to Clemmie, and Rupert’s role in it all. Caius can’t help but find her fascinating, even as he knows he should keep his distance. But when Nell’s life is endangered, what uneasy alliances will Caius be forced to make in order to prevent more people from dying?

As steeped in the classics as it is in England’s colonial past, The Other Half is a witty and occasionally heartbreaking look at life among the very rich and the people who orbit around them in modern-day London. Nell, and especially Caius, are refreshingly realistic characters struggling to reconcile the harsh inequalities of daily existence with what they believe to be true and what they desire to manifest in their own lives, primarily freedom and justice. Charlotte Vassell writes with keen observation and an excellent ear for banter, particularly between Caius and his hilarious team. While the narrative here wraps up beautifully, I’m definitely hooked on wanting to know more about Caius, whether it be his future with Heloise or what happened in his past with Lydia. I can’t wait to devour the next book in this series!