Another mystery for Lynn Shepherd’s nineteenth-century detective Charles Maddox, and another superlatively clever take on a literary monument. Charles’ great-uncle sorted out Murder at Mansfield Park (pace Jane Austen), and he has himself pulled skeletons from the cupboards of Dickens’ Bleak House (in Tom-All-Alone’s) and tracked down the poet Shelley’s doppelgänger (in A Treacherous Likeness). Now Maddox encounters a world which might, in an alternative universe, belong to Bram Stoker and his sanguinophile Count.Have you read Dracula? It’s a frightening and archetypal story, the father of libraries of horror books and films, but, goodness, is it stodgy and hard-going. Lynn Shepherd’s riff on the story is in another league for its elegance, w