Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr, #20) by C.S. Harris Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, regency mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #20
Pages: 384
Published by Berkley on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
The gruesome murder of a prominent nobleman throws an already unsettled London into chaos in this electrifying new historical mystery by the USA Today bestselling author of What Cannot Be Said.
August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim—Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent’s boon companions—was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace.
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man’s orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian’s life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem.
As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes.
My Review:
One of the things I utterly adore about this series is the way that each book is firmly fixed in its time and place, and that that foundation in its there and then shows the exact opposite of ANY vision we might have in our heads about what the Regency period was like. Especially if that vision owes its glitter and sparkle to Bridgerton, Georgette Heyer or even Jane Austen.
This particular entry in the series shines a light in darker places than usual, as it takes place in the summer of 1816, which, basically, wasn’t. Not that the summers of 1817, 1818 and 1819 were all that summer-y either. Although the sunsets were spectacular for years afterwards.
What made the situation so much darker and chillier, as this book explores rather, well, darkly, is that they didn’t know WHY clouds and storms blotted out the sun for days and weeks on end. It’s not totally unreasonable for people to have thought the world was coming to an end.
Because they were freezing and starving and it seemed like it would never end.
Not that already weren’t entirely too many people starving and shivering because Britain’s post-Napoleonic War economy was a wreck. The war was over – YAY! BUT, the soldiers were demobilized and thrown back into the population without pensions. The government was going through a period of austerity – for everyone but themselves, of course – and jobs were scarce.
And the government – and so many of the upper classes – were just so certain that it was the fault of the poor themselves that they were poor, and if they were just forced to be good, upright citizens who knew their place and didn’t question their betters that conditions would miraculously improve.
(And doesn’t that sound so very familiar?)
So when Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, gets called to the sight of the gruesome murder of one of those upper class so-called reformers, it’s clear exactly which rocks he’s going to be turning over to find out whodunnit. Because he’s certain that whoever the killer might have been, it’s not going to be the easy solution that the Crown demands in order to, well, keep order among the lower classes while hoping to satisfy the upper classes that justice is being done.
Even if it isn’t. And won’t. Unless Devlin gets his hands dirty with yet another investigation that some members of his own family would prefer he left well enough alone. Even if that well enough isn’t well at all – and they know it.
Escape Rating A+: I’ve not been remotely coy about the fact that I love this series, and this entry absolutely did not change my mind one iota. Over the course of 20 books in 20 years – and counting – it just gets better and better.
Over the course of the series I’ve realized that I’m mostly here for the historical fiction aspects of the series. Not just the way that the author illuminates this time and place that we think we know, but also the way that we walk London’s streets with Devlin and feel the cobblestones under our own feet.
At the same time, the mystery is always important and not merely in the sense of figuring out both whodunnit and why it was done. Murder is a disruption to order – to the way things ought to be. The Regency period, with its incapacitated king and its overly self-indulgent regent who will be king, was a period where order was already disrupted. And that’s before one factors in the disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
Meanwhile, the seeds for the Industrial Revolution have already been sown, and revolt and rebellion are bubbling up from the so-called lower orders who have seen their disruptions and results in nearby France and in the far away but less bloody and more successful United States. Change is in the wind – even if that wind is not blowing the skies clear enough to grow crops.
The disruptions caused by murder in this series, particularly this murder, are intended to show what’s lurking in the depths that is usually covered over by government propaganda and social expectations.
Because the victim in this particular case was believed to be a ‘good’ if somewhat priggish man who was working for the ‘betterment’ of the country even if he was a bit overbearing about it all. But someone knows that facade was just that, a false front that they are determined to strip away. This is a fascinating case because the point of it is NOT to capture a villain, but to expose exactly how much of a villain the murder victim really was – and to uncover his confederates in that villainy.
Justice, such as it turns out to be in this case, has already been had. And this entry in the series is all the more interesting for its purposes to have been so turned around and yet resolved as satisfactorily as possible.
I was all in on this one from the very first page, and finished the story in a bit of a sad catharsis because I was glad to see it resolved but that resolve is equivocal in exactly the way that it should be and that was marvelous in its way.
One final note about this story. I’m surprised to have a readalike for this that is not historical fiction or mystery, but if you’re interested in the effects of the year without a summer, there’s an award winning science fiction short story, “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer, that deals with the effects of a similar situation on one small community and its lovely and hopeful in ways that make it a good follow up to Who Will Remember.
