Frog Music review Emma Donoghue's sophisticated whodunnit

This 19th-century San Francisco suspense novel tells us plenty about parenthood today

Emma Donoghue's Room was the literary sensation of 2010, selling a million copies and narrowly missing out on the Man Booker. The novel a fiction sparked from the grisly facts of the Josef Fritzl case belonged to a recent sub-genre of high-end succès de scandale, alongside Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap , Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin , and Herman Koch's The Dinner .

The success of Room rather swamped recognition of Donoghue's previous efforts. She was, in fact, already an accomplished author of historical fiction, with 2000's Slammerkin an atmospheric romp set amid the taverns and brothels of 18th-century England. It should come as no surprise, then, that Frog Music, her eighth novel and the follow-up to Room, is not some grisly modern morality tale, but takes place on the seedy post-gold rush streets of 1870s San Francisco.