It's 1876 and Charles Lenox has abandoned his promising career in Parliament in favor of his fascination with detection. Drawing on his reputation and contacts as an amateur sleuth, he is now a partner in a detective agency, along with his former protegee Lord John Dallington, and the intrepid Miss Polly Strickland.
Just now London is agog with the mysterious disappearance of a celebrated German pianist and favorite of the Royal family. Charles and his partners desperately want to be called in by Scotland Yard to consult on the case, but their overtures have been rebuffed, and a rival agency has been hired instead.
Charles is also concerned about the desolate state of his elder brother Sir Edmund, who is mourning the sudden death of his wife Molly. When business requires Edmund to return to the family estate in Sussex where Molly died, Charles decides to go with him. No sooner have they arrived then they learn that the peace of Lenox House and the nearby village of Markethouse has been disturbed by a series of small but strange incidents targeting a respectable resident of the village. Lenox investigates, coaxing his brother to participate (in the hopes of distracting Edmund from his grief). But as the odd happenings continue, Charles begins to suspect there is something seriously amiss in Markethouse.
Juggling two myserious cases, one on London and one in Sussex, Charles finds his powers of detection challenged at every turn. Neither case is as simple as it seemed at first. Reputations and lives are hanging precariously in the balance. Worst of all, Charles finds no matter what he does, any sense of justice achieved is ambivalent at best.
Finch writes well: his characters come alive on the page, his plots are fiendishly clever, and his research incorporates fascinating details of everyday life in Victorian England. This is the ninth book in the Charles Lenox Mysteries Series. It can be read as a stand alone, but I recommend reading the series in order, starting with A Beautiful Blue Death.
Click HERE for a review from Publisher's Weekly.
Click HERE for a review from the Reading the Past Blog.
Click HERE for a review from The Bookwyrm's Hoard web site.
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