A Pretender's Murder (Eric Peterkin, #2) by Christopher Huang Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Eric Peterkin #2
Pages: 396
Published by Inkshares on February 24, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Colonel Russell before the War had four sons; now he has four widowed daughters-in-law, each facing the aftermath in her own iconic way. Then an old friend of the Colonel’s dead sons resurfaces, reawakening tales of wartime espionage — enemy spies preying on the unwitting families at home — and is he really who he says? When the Colonel is thrown bodily through an upstairs window of his London Club, Eric Peterkin is once again called to investigate.
Eric Peterkin’s second mystery is about recognising that war impacts more than just the men who there are wheels turning behind the scenes and strings being pulled from afar, and the people we leave behind might ultimately leave us behind. Set in the 1920s and the aftermath of the Great War, the story honours the period by reflecting the changing social mores, the gradual emancipation of women, the questioning of tradition, and the illusion of innocence — the truth behind the facade, against a backdrop of ongoing war trauma.
My Review:
In the first book in this series, A Gentleman’s Murder, we were introduced to the rarefied world of the Britannia, one of Britain’s rarefied ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. The Britannia, with its particular long and storied history, is a bit different from the more famous, and occasionally infamous, White’s, Brooks’s and Boodle’s. Because prospective members do not merely need to be ‘gentlemen’ but need specifically to be gentlemen who have served in one of Britain’s many, many wars over the centuries since the Britannia was founded.
Eric Peterkin, the amateur detective of this series, is a member of the Britannia. In fact, his family is the last remaining founding family of the club, and Peterkin’s service as a Lieutenant in “the war to end all wars” more than meets the requirement for military service. But Peterkin’s membership was contested and very much in doubt at the beginning of that first book. His father may have been a direct descendant of one of the founders, but Eric’s mother was a Chinese woman who spent her life trying to ensure that her children, Erik and his sister Penny, would be British enough to truly belong in her adopted country.
Not that either of them is ever truly allowed to forget that they look ‘foreign’ no matter how British they act or how little of their mother’s heritage they even know.
After the events of the first book, Eric has moved from being an obvious outsider to an actual insider, at least within the confines of his own club. In the wake of that murder and catastrophe – and Eric’s successful investigation of it – Eric is now the club’s secretary.
Definitely a case of “no good deed going unpunished” as being the Club Secretary is a lot of real work – especially when your predecessor was murdered!
So when the club’s interim chairman is ALSO murdered, Eric has more than enough on his plate. And he has hope that Scotland Yard will do a decent job of investigating this time around – instead of taking the easy way out and accusing an obviously innocent staff member because none of the so-called gentlemen of the club could possibly have been so ungentlemanly as to murder one of their own.
But he’s tempted to try anyway. So the moment that it looks like the investigator in charge is taking the easy way out for a bit of quick glory, Eric finds himself back on the case. Because he still can’t let one of “his men”, which is exactly how he thinks of the club’s staff, be condemned for a crime they obviously did not commit.
Following the treacherous trail of who DID murder the late Colonel Hadrian Russell, and why, is going to drag Peterkin and company from a London that is just emerging from winter to a tuberculosis sanatorium in remote Switzerland that is still caught in its depths, as well as from the bloodless halls of power in London back to the mud and blood of the trenches of the late war,
Because the war is always with all the members of the Britannia, in the form of scarred bodies and burned lungs and sudden nightmares of shell-shock. But the truth of this murder will be the worst shock of all – and the worst betrayal.
Escape Rating A: I read A Gentleman’s Murder almost a year ago, and have been waiting for this book ever since. It was absolutely worth the wait and there are multiple reasons why that is so.
Let’s start with Peterkin himself. Part of the story in the first book was the way that Peterkin was constantly reminded that he was an outsider even though he should have been an insider by inheritance. In this second book, he’s moved towards the inside, so a piece of the story sets up a foil to remind him that he really still isn’t by giving that situation a bit of a different focus.
The investigator sent by Scotland Yard, Inspector Crane, has just returned to London after ten years in Hong Kong where he’s become very much a Sinophile. Crane deeply admires all things Chinese and it’s clear that Hong Kong is the home of his heart no matter where he might be. His first act is to address Peterkin in Mandarin, a language with which Peterkin has zero familiarity. Eric’s mother may have been Chinese but he and his sister Penny were born in Britain and raised in India. Their mother deliberately did not teach either of them about her side of their heritage. They are both British to their cores.
Which made it all the more fascinating that in his first big case as Club Secretary, a position that marks him as ‘veddy’ British indeed, Crane is disappointed because Peterkin is not Chinese enough. (A situation which has PLENTY of resonance to the present day for anyone who has ever been asked “Where are you FROM?” with emphasis on the FROM because someone doesn’t look in whatever way the questioner expects.)
So much of this murder, the history of the Britannia, and Peterkin’s own history and that of all of its members, is rooted in World War I. Other mysteries have dealt with the human cost of the ‘Great War’, including Charles Todd’s Inspector Ian Rutledge series and Dorothy L. Sayers’ classic Lord Peter Wimsey series, but the Peterkin series takes all of that a step further in Peterkin’s acknowledgement of his own PTSD and how much it still affects him, but also in the way their lingering injuries and PTSD haunt ALL the members of the Britannia. They’ve all served, and they are all still paying for that service.
The web of secrets and lies that Peterkin has to work his way through to solve the murder also has its roots in the war. So much of what Peterkin uncovers about the late Colonel is so utterly unthinkable that Peterkin literally cannot wrap his mind around it. He shies away from the obvious – to the reader – conclusion for as long as he can and much longer than he should. That internal angst with no reasonable outlet is also part of the cost of that war.
And last, but definitely not least, is the way that the victim’s true nature is revealed – not through his own words and deeds but through the perspectives of his four widowed daughters-in-law who all saw the man for who he truly was. And also, in their responses to him and to the loss of the sons he raised, manage to embody the archetypes of what middle-and-upper-class women faced before, during and after the war.
Even as the next war already looms on the horizon.
One (nearly) final note. Most mysteries begin with the upset of order and end with the re-establishment of order through the punishment of the guilty. This one kind of does but kind of doesn’t – and is all the more interesting for it. It’s not just that the truly guilty have already been punished, or even that the so-called ‘order’ of the time before the war can’t possibly be restored – and mostly shouldn’t – but that in this instance justice is best served by not coming within a whole, entire continent of any official version of it.
Returning to on that horizon, however, lies the question of when we’ll get to read Eric Peterkin’s next adventure. Because this inquiring mind would really, REALLY like to know.
