SOURCE: “Goings-On in Old London,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 25, 1995, p. 12.

In the following review, Meyer offers a positive assessment of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree.

In the literary pantheon the mystery or detective novel is largely relegated to an inferior rung on the ladder. Yet isn’t “Oedipus the King,” when all’s said and done, a detective story, complete with “surprise” final twist ending in which the detective discovers to his horror that the murderer he has been searching for is himself? The fact that “Oedipus” is a great deal more than a detective story ought not to obscure the fact that it is also nothing less—and one, moreover, that works triumphantly on its own terms. Agatha Christie could not devise a better plot.

In The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Peter Ackroyd may not have written anything to compare with Oedipus, but he...