In the Victorian manner

"I shall tell you about it, but not at present," a character says to the narrator of Michael Cox's new Victorian thriller, "The Glass of Time." She is declaring Cox's motto as a storyteller. He has absorbed into his bones the dictum usually attributed to Wilkie Collins, the Victorian novelist who seems to be his primary model: "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait."

Cox takes this rule and runs with it, creating a story that is somehow both leisurely and gripping. Readers will surely fall under Cox's spell and settle down to wait for resolutions to the mysteries that unfold. But it will definitely require waiting. For most of these 500-plus pages, the narrator doesn't even realize quite as much as the reader does about what is going on around her. After a brief, coy preface by someone describing the source of this text -- a foolscap manuscript at Harvard -- Cox leaps into the voice of his young female narrator: "I wish you, first of all, to imagine that you are standing beside me."

Well known in mystery and crime fields before becoming a novelist, Michael Cox wrote a biography of M.R. James, the great British ghost story writer, and edited collections of detective, ghost and spy stories for Oxford University Press. His own life seems to have had no shortage of drama. Cox began his career as a musician and songwriter, recording albums in the 1970s. After making notes for three decades toward a detective novel set in Victorian London, he was diagnosed with cancer that might have resulted in blindness. He decided to race against fate to complete it, and the result was "The Meaning of Night," an international bestseller published last year. Apparently Cox kept his pen racing across the page -- it's difficult to imagine this tale emerging from a computer -- because he's back already with a new book.

Edward Glyver, the narrator of "The Meaning of Night," was a brutal murderer. With his second book, Cox has stayed with a first-person narrator -- a point of view that provides useful limitations for a thriller writer. But he has broadened the range of his ventriloquism. This time around, we navigate these dark waters through the attentive eyes of Esperanza Gorst, a 19-year-old who, at the behest of her guardian, has wormed her way into a "Bleak House"-sort of palace in the guise of a lady's maid. She has entered the employ of the mysterious Lady Tansor and soon encounters her two very different sons, Randolph and Perseus. Not surprisingly, they, like almost every other person in this book, are hiding secrets. The parade of twists and revelations provide a satisfying, old-fashioned reading experience.