A Pinchbeck Bride

A young woman in Victorian finery is found strangled in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a nineteenth-century time capsule in Boston's Back Bay. Dubbed the "Victorian Girl" by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation—and a darkness reaching back to the Mingoes' roots in England and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife.

Boston comic Mark Winslow and the other trustees of Mingo House are d...