A- #BookReview: A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

A- #BookReview: A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher HuangA Gentleman's Murder (Eric Peterkin #1) by Christopher Huang
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Eric Peterkin #1
Pages: 352
Published by Inkshares on July 31, 2018
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The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London's back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War.
Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders himself, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: The Britannia. But when a gentleman's wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim's last words echo in the Lieutenant’s head: that he would "soon right a great wrong from the past."
Eric is certain that one of his fellow members is the murderer: but who? Captain Mortimer Wolfe, the soldier’s soldier thrice escaped from German custody? Second Lieutenant Oliver Saxon, the brilliant codebreaker? Or Captain Edward Aldershott, the steely club president whose Savile Row suits hide a frightening collision of mustard gas scars?
Eric's investigation will draw him far from the marbled halls of the Britannia, to the shadowy remains of a dilapidated war hospital and the heroin dens of Limehouse. And as the facade of gentlemenhood cracks, Eric faces a Matryoshka doll of murder, vice, and secrets pointing not only to the officers of his own club but the very investigator assigned by Scotland Yard.

My Review:

I picked this up because I got teased into it by a promo for the second book in the series (A Pretender’s Murder) that described it as “Agatha Christie and Anthony Horowitz Meet in 1925 London”. Something about that description started calling my name, because wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing? So I picked up this first book and got instantly hooked.

Detectives are always outsiders in one way or another, and Eric Peterkin is definitely a part of that tradition, amateur though he is. Peterkin is, on his father’s side, the latest in a long line of Peterkins who have served England in her military for generations. He’s a member of the Britannia Club, a club reserved for men who not only served their country but saw action in whichever of the Empire’s wars happened to occur during their lifetimes.

As this story takes place in 1924, it’s not a surprise that Peterkin, along with most of his contemporaries, served in “the war to end all wars” – and that they are scarred by that service in one way or another – or many.

But England isn’t Peterkin’s only country – even if he owes no allegiance to any other. His mother was Chinese, and Eric Peterkin and his sister Penny were raised in India, where his father served the Raj.

His membership in the Britannia Club was contentious from the beginning. While a Peterkin has been a member of the Britannia Club since its founding, and the Peterkins are the last founding family left on the membership rolls, all that most other members see is that Eric is not “one of them” no matter his name. All they see is the mixed heritage on his face – and most of them never let him forget it.

When a murder is committed, not just on the very grounds of the Britannia but inside its normally locked vault, Peterkin feels honor-bound to see justice done. Not just because of his ties to the club and to the Peterkins that came before him, but also to the dead man, a new member who had confided in him that he had come to the Britannia to right a wrong and see justice finally granted to an innocent man – and that the proof of that innocence was locked away in the club’s vault for safekeeping.

That Peterkin’s job is to vet mystery and thriller manuscripts for a small publisher, that he adores crime solving by proxy and sees fictional mysteries as a great game to be played and won by the reader, gives him, perhaps, a sense of competence in solving this very real murder that is not justified by his actual experience.

What he does have, however and very much, is both a keen mind and a fresh eye, a willingness to look at the evidence that is actually before him instead of the machinations and favoritism of the old boys’ network of which he is unlikely to ever be a part. Peterkin is willing to follow the clues to the truth – no matter which favors or whose protections he tears down along the way.

This case is going to be the making of him. If it doesn’t break him or kill him first.

Escape Rating A-: This was absolutely grand, and I had a grand time with it. This was exactly the kind of absorbing, convoluted mystery that I’ve been in the mood for and I’m ever so glad I picked it up and pretty much raced through it in just two big bites.

Eric Peterkin is a fascinating protagonist, as he’s very much of the “fools rush in” sort of character. He does have a tendency to leap before he looks – and that’s both exactly what this case needs and fits with where he’s coming from. This is definitely the “Roaring 20’s” and part of that roar is everyone doing their damndest to forget the horrors of the war just past and hope like hell that they won’t have to go through that again in their lifetimes.

So, to a certain extent, Eric gets into this investigation to solve the puzzle, because he’s good at solving puzzles and he sees literary mysteries as a bit of a game. Which they were. That this one is real just pulls him deeper in, as he sees that injustice is being done and he can’t resist tilting at that particular windmill no matter how many people attempt to steer him away.

But as much as Peterkin is playing a game, he’s also trying to shove down a reality that comes around to bite him and his contemporaries more often than any of them are willing to admit. Peterkin, and all of the members of the Britannia, have PTSD – even if it wasn’t called that then and even if there wasn’t much sympathy or empathy for it and even though just needing treatment for it made them all feel like failures.

The war is still very much with them, often at the times when they least expect it. (If this part of the story either feels familiar or you are interested in other characters dealing with this issue at this time because it is a truth that got buried for a long time, check out the Inspector Ian Rutledge series by Charles Todd and also the classic Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers as both acknowledged their PTSD and dealt with it both well and very, very badly indeed.)

The mystery in this story turned out to be twofold. Or on two tracks. Or a bit of both. On the one hand, there’s the whodunnit and who benefited from it – the usual central questions in a mystery. On the other, and the roadblock that Peterkin rams his head into repeatedly, is that this is also a mystery that is twisted and turned by a succession of people with the very best of intentions laying the paving stones on the road to hell, and then being surprised and even overcome when a villain takes advantage of that work to ease his own trip in that direction.

A Gentleman’s Murder turned out to be a fantastic way to spend a few glorious reading hours. I’m left with one question which I sincerely hope will be answered in the second book in the series – the one that got me into this in the first place – A Pretender’s Murder, coming to the US in July. I’m expecting GREAT things!

Grade A #BookReview: Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd

Grade A #BookReview: Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess KiddMurder at Gulls Nest (Nora Breen Investigates #1) by Jess Kidd
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Nora Breen Investigates #1
Pages: 325
Published by Atria Books on April 8, 2025
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A cozy mystery series about a former nun who searches for answers in a small seaside town after her pen pal mysteriously disappears
1954: When her former novice’s dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda’s letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent. A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests—but when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it’s time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.

My Review:

For a cozy mystery, Murder at Gulls Nest is a bit twisty and occasionally downright creepy, but in the case of this particular case – that’s a marvelous thing!

Nora Breen has come a long way to arrive at little Gore-on-Sea on the Kentish coast. All the way from more than 30 years as a nun, out of the convent and straight into the room that her former novice occupied in a somewhat rundown boarding house just before she disappeared.

A disappearance which has led to Nora being out in the world for the first time in decades, having entered her monastery in the post-World War I years after a personal tragedy, and emerged in 1954, not long after an entirely different war whose scars are still healing, both on the country and especially on its people.

She’s just a bit overwhelmed – but she’s also very determined. As well as downright nosy – a predilection that was considered a flaw in her former vocation. But out in the world that gets a considerably more mixed reception. The local police inspector in Gore-on-Sea – and in fact the entire police station – also believe it’s a flaw, and an annoying flaw at that. Nora, on the other hand, is having a bit too good of a time figuring out how to interrogate her fellow boarders without making them feel like they are being interrogated. Even though they are.

Which doesn’t stop Detective Inspector Rideout from relying on Nora’s nosiness, her stubbornness, and her imagination fired up by years of reading detective mysteries, to help him solve a puzzling series of murders at that boarding house, Gulls Nest. Murders that the coroner would much rather sweep under the rug as either suicides or accidents even though Nora is convinced that there is a murderer hiding among the eccentric guests.

And that her missing friend was the murderer’s first victim.

Escape Rating A: Murder at Gulls Nest turned out to be one of the creepiest cozies I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading – but a pleasure and a delight it certainly was. This is the first book in a series, so Gore-on-Sea could certainly get cozier, but as the place stands right now it seems like a good place to get murdered in.

This story, and the series, begins in one of the usual ways that classic mystery series begin when the sleuth is an amateur – meaning that Nora’s first case is entirely personal at the outset. In Nora’s particular case, that she has come to discover the fate of one of her novices allows Nora to both reminisce about her time in the monastery and ruminate on the life that brought her there and the compulsion that pulled her out.

And we do get more than enough to get what she came from and where she’s coming from, even though it’s an experience that seems just as much a part of the past as the mid-century, post-war setting in the kind of seaside holiday town that was on its way out then and of which there are only remnants now.

What draws Nora into the mystery as a whole, and the reader right along with her, are the downright eccentric denizens of Gulls Nest, from the opiate-addled landlady and her ‘wild child’ young daughter to the retired traveling puppeteer, the smooth black marketeer and the dour housekeeper who is so clearly a candidate to be either the murderer or the scapegoat.

As the residents drop one-by-one, the motive for the murders gets murkier and murkier. Not that there weren’t plenty of possible motives and suspects for each individual murder, but the question of who benefits from ALL of the murders drives Rideout and Nora into a reluctant investigative partnership that pushes the story forward even as Nora pokes her nose into people and places that seem as if they couldn’t possibly be relevant until they finally are.

It’s a relationship that works in spite of the initial inclinations of the people in it, and it develops from suspicion to annoyance to grudging respect to friendship in a way that feels organic to the characters and sets an excellent foundation for the series.

I had a grand time with Nora Breen as she stuck her ‘coulter’ – meaning nose – into places she probably shouldn’t but that someone absolutely did need to stick some kind of oar into. I loved her investigative technique of nosiness with a bit more heart and understanding than her own reading of detective novels had led her to expect. I found the murders appropriately twisty, the motive at the heart of it all just a bit heartbreaking, and was happy to see order restored and chaos put properly in its place.

That this is the opening of a series was definitely the icing on a very tasty murder cake that only occasionally held a hint of bitter almond. Exactly how Nora is going to manage to keep herself on in Gore-on-Sea (and OMG that name is both a hint and a hoot under the circumstances) I can’t wait to see who and/or what she digs into next!

A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris

A+ #BookReview: Who Will Remember by C.S. HarrisWho 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 WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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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.

Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm. Painting by John Constable (1816)

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.

A- #BookReview: The Three Locks by Bonnie MacBird + Giveaway!

A- #BookReview: The Three Locks by Bonnie MacBird + Giveaway!The Three Locks (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #4) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #4
Pages: 418
Published by Collins Crime Club, HarperCollins on April 13, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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A heatwave melts London as Holmes and Watson are called to action in this new Sherlock Holmes adventure by Bonnie MacBird, author of "one of the best Sherlock Holmes novels of recent memory." In the West End, a renowned Italian escape artist dies spectacularly on stage during a performance – immolated in a gleaming copper cauldron of his wife's design. In Cambridge, the runaway daughter of a famous don is found drowned, her long blonde hair tangled in the Jesus Lock on the River Cam. And in Baker Street, a mysterious locksmith exacts an unusual price to open a small silver box sent to Watson. From the glow of London's theatre district to the buzzing Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where physicists explore the edges of the new science of electricity, Holmes and Watson race between the two cities to solve the murders, encountering prevaricating prestidigitators, philandering physicists and murderous mentalists, all the while unlocking secrets which may be best left undisclosed. And one, in particular, is very close to home.

My Review:

I lost count of the total number of locks in this story early on, but I’m absolutely certain there were considerably more than three such items, particularly as more than one escape artist festooned himself with several at a time. Including Sherlock Holmes.

But the first lock in this story is certainly the most poignant, not because it’s a trick lock – although it absolutely is – but because the key to it is locked in Dr. John Watson’s mind or memory. The fancy, filigreed, metal box arrives as a very late delivery from Watson’s equally late mother. The woman is 20 years dead, the box was supposed to have been delivered 10 years earlier, and Watson isn’t certain how he feels about what might be inside other than frustrated as it was not accompanied by its key and more than one locksmith has already thrown up their hands at the thing.

As this story opens, Watson is likewise frustrated with, or certainly in even less charity than usual, with Holmes’ rather high-handed treatment of him as well as his incessant showing-off of his gifts of observation by both observing and remarking upon things that Watson would rather not hear about. Such as the fact that Watson is frequently short in the pocket because he gambles more than he can afford to lose. And that perhaps he’s picked up a pound or three of excess avoirdupois that he can’t afford to gain.

No one enjoys being reminded of their own shortcomings – particularly when that reminder comes from someone who can’t seem to resist crowing about it more than a bit even as they refuse to acknowledge their own.

The cases that find Holmes and Watson as they are somewhat on the outs with each other present the pair with plenty of opportunities to disagree while there are several rather puzzling games afoot.

They are called to Cambridge by a nervous young clergyman who fears for the life of one of his parishioners. That said parishioner is young, beautiful and wealthy, and that she is dangling her possible affections in the path of not one or two but THREE young men – including the clergyman – makes this seem like the sort of melodrama that Holmes usually steers far away from.

They are also visited by a dynamic and vibrant woman of the stage – not the theatre stage but the magical stage. Madame Ilaria Borelli sees herself as an angel who takes promising stage magicians on as projects, provides them with career-making trick devices and effects – and then leaves them behind when they start believing that their new-found success is all their own doing. Her motives for calling on Holmes are obscured – as if by the smoke and mirrors of her profession – but he can’t resist this mystery any more than he can the conundrum in Cambridge.

That these two parallel mysteries, both involving provocative women who seem to lie like they breathe, and both involving locks of vastly different types, coalesce into one deadly mess is just what we expect from this pair. Two of the three locks in this case turn out to be deadly. But one heals a bit of Watson’s long-held heartbreak and guilt. All of which seems fitting for Holmes and Watson, as they put the lock on two murders and solve one of the great locked puzzles of Watson’s life.

Escape Rating A-: When I began reading this series back in November, that first book, Art in the Blood, had been buried deeply in the virtually towering TBR pile for nearly a decade. I was looking for a comfort read. As I always find Sherlock Holmes stories comforting, and I’d just finished something Holmes-like and was in search of yet more comfort, I remembered this series and as the saying goes, “Bob’s your uncle”. That I have now finished this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series – at least until the next book appears – in just six months says something about how much I’ve enjoyed the whole thing. Which I absolutely have.

Part of the fun of this series is that the portrayals of these well-known characters owe every bit as much to the screen portrayals of Holmes and Watson over the past 40 or so years (since Jeremy Brett on Masterpiece Theatre) as they do to the original canon. Many readers have claimed that this particular version owes more to the Robert Downey Jr/Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies than it does any other. Certainly, Watson and Holmes’ byplay in this particular entry in this particular series feels like it’s more from those movies than some of the other variations as they are more impatient with each other than is usually seen.

But what makes this particular series different from the others is the way that this author dives a bit more into their respective pasts. While the lock that opens this story is a piece of Watson’s past that we haven’t seen before, the overall series shows us a Holmes who is and has always been aware that he is a bit different from the norms of his time – and not just because he’s a genius. And that awareness gives him a sympathy with others who are similarly affected that we definitely see in this story.

Both Ilaria Borelli and Odelia Wyndham are women who refuse to fit into the boxes that Victorian society would imprison them in – and that’s why Holmes takes up their cases. He is particularly sympathetic to Odelia Wyndham, a bird in a gilded cage trying to break free by whatever means are available to her – and he fears from the very beginning that her thrashing within that cage is going to get her killed. Which it does, ensnared in Jesus Lock on the River Cam.

These are both the types of cases that the canon Holmes wouldn’t have touched. That he does here gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of a man who refuses to admit that he’s being driven by his heart and it adds new dimensions to a character we thought we knew.

If you like twisty mysteries, if you enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories, or if you’re looking for a new take on something familiar, this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series is delightful. So delightful, in fact, that I’m a bit sad that I’m caught up because now I’ll have to wait and see whether or not it continues with my fingers crossed in hope.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

I’ve read through the (so far) six books in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series by Bonnie MacBird in just six months because they feature fresh interpretations of characters that I know and love, they are marvelous and absorbing historical mysteries, and they ably filled my need for comfort reads at a time when such have been needed more than ever. I’ve had a grand time slipping into this world with these characters, and I fully confess I’m more than a bit sad that I don’t have any left until the much hoped for next book in the series arrives.

So I’m sharing my love of this series with all of you, in the hopes that making more readers for it will bring the next book faster. At the very least, I promise a good reading time – especially for the winner of today’s giveaway. On this the FIFTH day of this year’s celebration, I’m giving away the winner’s choice of ANY book in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series by Bonnie MacBird in any format, up to $25(US) which should be enough to get even the latest book, The Serpent Under, if you’re already caught up.

Good luck with today’s giveaway, don’t forget to check out the previous days’ giveaways and remember that there’s still more to come!

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Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ RozanThe Railway Conspiracy (Dee & Lao, #2) by John Shen Yen Nee, S.J. Rozan
Narrator: Daniel York Loh
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Dee & Lao #2
Pages: 304
Length: 8 hours and 25 minutes
Published by Recorded Books, Soho Crime on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Judge Dee and Lao She must use all their powers of deduction—and kung fu skills—to take down a sinister conspiracy between Imperial Russia, Japan, and China in a rollicking new mystery set in 1920s London.
The follow-up to The Murder of Mr. Ma, this historical adventure-mystery is perfect for fans of Laurie R. King and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films.
London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to foil a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a Japanese mercenary. Aided by Lao She—the Watson to his Holmes—along with several other colorful characters, Dee stops the illicit sale of an extremely valuable “dragon-taming” mace.
The mace’s owner is a Chinese businesswoman who thanks Dee for its retrieval by throwing a lavish dinner party. In attendance is British banking official A. G. Stephen, who argues with the group about the tenuous state of Chinese nationalism—and is poisoned two days later. Dee knows this cannot be a coincidence, and suspects Stephen won’t be the only victim. Sure enough, a young Chinese communist of Lao’s acquaintance is killed not long after—and a note with a strange symbol is found by his body.
What could connect these murders? Could it be related to rumors of a conspiracy regarding the Chinese Eastern Railway? It is once again all on the unlikely crime-solving duo of Dee and Lao to solve the case before anyone else ends up tied to the rails.

My Review:

I was completely enthralled by the first book in the Dee & Lao series, The Murder of Mr. Ma, and have been hoping for a second since the minute I turned the very last page of that first. So I was more than pleased to see this second book appear – even if finishing it has returned me to my earlier state, now hoping for a third book to be published.

Because this second adventure was every bit as marvelous as the first – and in some ways better as we already know these characters but now have the opportunity to plumb their hidden – and sometimes not so hidden – depths.

This second of Dee and Lao’s adventures is set in 1924 London. Both characters are based on real historical figures. Lao’s background and current profession were historically as the series portrays him. From 1924 until 1929, he was a lecturer at the University of London on the subjects of Chinese language and literature. Whether his students were as frustrating, and whether Lao himself was as utterly bored out of his mind as he is portrayed in the story, is not certain, but they certainly leave the fictional Lao ripe to be carried along in Dee’s adventures.

Spring Heeled Jack as depicted in the English penny dreadful Spring-Heeled Jack #2, Aldine Publishing, 1904.

Dee Ren Jie is as much myth as he is historical, but the historical Dee was a magistrate in late 7th century China. How much the historical Dee resembles this fictional interpretation is unknown, but I think it’s safe to say that the original Dee never masqueraded as the English folk hero/demon Spring-heeled Jack – as Lao’s friend Dee often does.

The story combines these bits of history with a compelling, confounding mystery, as all the best historical mysteries do.

Dee has returned to London after a year’s absence as an agent of the then-current Nationalist government in China. But that government is shaky at best. There are movements within China, including but not limited to the Communist Party, to bring the Nationalist government down. And there are forces outside China, great and would-be great powers far from limited to Britain, Russia, Japan and the United States, observing and even influencing events hoping that to destabilize the Nationalist regime so that they can pick up the pieces.

Which is where Dee and Lao and their associates, the redoubtable Sergeant Hoong and young English pickpocket Jimmy Fingers come into this tale, which begins with the return of a precious stolen artifact, middles in a great deal of romantic misdirection practiced successfully upon the supposedly impervious Dee, and concludes with an explosive confrontation on the London Necropolis Railway. (The Necropolis Railway is another bit of history that seems like it must be fiction, but it did really exist!)

When the dust settles, and there’s LOTS of it to settle, the immediate crisis – at least the London branch of it – is over. Dee is left realizing that he’s been a fool. And that while this crisis has been ameliorated it has absolutely not been averted – but that the fight will take him to other shores in other guises. In addition to making a fool out of him, the conspiracy has also made him their scapegoat, and London has become much too hot for him – at least as long as he continues to present himself as, well, himself.

So poor Lao is stuck returning to the boredom of his academic existence, while the country he left behind and plans to return to, is in jeopardy from all sides – including the one that he himself espouses.

It all sounds ripe for another book, doesn’t it? I certainly hope so!

Escape Rating A: I loved this even more than I did the first book, The Murder of Mr. Ma, which means that I need to give another shoutout to First Clue Reviews for their featured review of that first book.

One of the reasons I liked this better leads around and back to the other reason I got into this series. Many of the reviews of Dee & Lao liken them to Sherlock Holmes, especially the more active Guy Ritchie movie interpretations. While I think that is debatable, one way in which Dee & Lao are certainly like Holmes and Watson (and also Barker & Llewelyn) is that Lao serves as Dee’s chronicler as Watson does Holmes, with the same amount of reluctance to participate in the process on the parts of both Dee and Holmes.

Which means that this story is told in Lao’s first person voice. This is his interpretation – with the occasional use of a bit of literary license – of the events. In that regard, the narrator Daniel York Loh does a terrific job of interpreting Lao’s voice, to the point that when I ended up reading the last part of the book because I needed to find out who the true leader of the conspiracy is and how all the issues and conundrums got resolved – I was still hearing Loh’s voice in my head speaking as Lao.

I couldn’t put this one down because of how effectively it combined the pure whodunnit of the theft and murder conspiracy in London with the depth of historical setting and situation that lay behind it and the increasing knowledge of and bond between the characters, this most unlikely band of ‘scoobies’ that includes a government official, a merchant, a scholar, a pickpocket and has increased by the addition of a knife thrower and a dog. Dee pretends they are a circus act and he’s not far wrong in some aspects, but if it is it’s a circus that manifests a well of competence and an ability to improvise on the spot and roll with the punches.

And not just the punches they are administering themselves.

This reader, at least, is already anticipating Dee and Lao’s next adventure. It’s sure to be another fantastic read. After all, thanks to the conspiracy it’s going to have to start with Dee coming back from the dead!

A- #BookReview: An Excellent Thing in a Woman by Allison Montclair

A- #BookReview: An Excellent Thing in a Woman by Allison MontclairAn Excellent Thing in a Woman (A Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery, #7) by Allison Montclair
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sparks & Bainbridge #7
Pages: 224
Published by Severn House on February 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The owners of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau are back, and more determined than ever to bring love matches to the residents of Post-WWII London . . . so something as trivial as a murder investigation isn't going to stop them!
London, 1947. Spirited Miss Iris Sparks and ever-practical Mrs Gwendolyn Bainbridge are called to action when Gwen's beau Salvatore 'Sally' Danielli is accused of murder!
Sally has taken a job at the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace, but when the beautiful Miss JeanneMarie Duplessis - one of the Parisian performers over for a new variety show - is found dead in the old theatre, a number of inconvenient coincidences make him Suspect
Just days earlier, Miss Duplessis had arrived at The Right Sort, desperately looking for a husband - any husband - to avoid having to return to Paris. As the plot thickens, Iris is pulled back into the clandestine circles she moved in during the war and it soon becomes apparent that to clear Sally's name, she and Gwen would need to go on the hunt for a killer once more!
Those who enjoy reading Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries and Dorothy Sayers will adore this warm and witty historical mystery!

My Review:

The Right Sort Marriage Bureau began by making one long-lasting partnership – and solving a murder into the bargain – in their very first outing, The Right Sort of Man.

The business partnership and ride-or-die sisterhood of Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge has held true through thick and thin, murder and mayhem, for six books so far, with this seventh proving that these two women are in it for each other – no matter what life throws in their way. Separately AND together.

Because they’ve always been separated by one BIG secret – not that they haven’t chipped at that secret’s edges over the course of their partnership.

During the war whose aftermath still scars London and the English countryside, Iris Sparks signed the Official Secrets Act, vowing to keep her clandestine work on behalf of the British government just that, a secret. Gwen has always known that Iris did a LOT of things she can’t talk about – if only because people from Iris’ life during those shadowy years keep showing up in her present.

This particular case, two years after the end of the war, is riddled with bullets and memories from those dark days – even as it portrays a world making bold strides towards the future.

The lights, cameras and action of the brave new world of television are about to bring British talent and culture – and slapstick – into the living rooms of thousands around the country – and eventually the world. But among the shadowy sets and hidden props a traitor has hidden in plain sight – one who plans to pin an entire new set of crimes and coverups on someone in the wrong place and the wrong time.

But he’s made one BIG mistake. He’s tried to fit a frame around someone that both Iris and Gwen hold dear – and neither of them can let that stand.

Escape Rating A-: Archie Spelling is dead, to begin with. The ending of the previous book, Murder at the White Palace, left the fate of Iris Sparks’ lover hanging by a thread. In the brief period between the end of that book and the beginning of this one, that thread was cut. Now Iris is the partner adrift at the Right Sort, while Gwen Bainbridge, finally free of the Lunacy Court and the oppressive conservatorship of her late husband’s wealthy family, has begun a new independent life in a new house with her young son AND has begun a romantic relationship of her own.

Gwen’s world is finally looking up, while Iris’ is mostly staring blearily at the bottom of a bottle, as the manner of Archie’s death, devastating enough in its own right, brought back to Iris entirely too many unresolved issues from her secret spy work during the war.

So Gwen is rising, Iris is falling, and their new case represents the changes coming even as it all goes very, very pear-shaped.

Television transmitter ‘mast’ at the Ally Pally ca 1935

Sparks & Bainbridge are investigating the murder of one of their clients – as they did in their first story – but this case in all of its fake tinsel and real tinsel, takes place at “Ally Pally”, the Alexandra Palace, home and headquarters of BBC television. A performer is dead, a stage manager is suspect, and Iris and Gwen are caught in the middle and tied up in knots by the Official Secrets Act that Iris signed long ago.

Because the dead woman, the accused stage manager, the likely murderer and pretty much every single person Iris runs into along the way of the investigation – all signed the Act and can’t talk about how they know each other, what they did together and separately, and why this murder has nothing to do with BBC TV now and everything to do with secret radio broadcasts from hidden bunkers in the midst of some very dark nights then.

If they don’t tell the truth, the wrong man will be hanged for the murder. If they do tell the truth, they’ll all hang for telling the tale.

Iris can’t save herself, but Gwen can save them all. By becoming part of the world of danger and derring-do that she’s been nibbling at the edges of since the day she met Iris Sparks. It looks like Sparks & Bainbridge are going to be up to their necks in the Cold War in future books in this series – and I can’t wait to read them!

A- #BookReview: The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig

A- #BookReview: The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren WilligThe Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, true crime
Pages: 352
Published by William Morrow on March 4, 2025
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Based on the true story of a famous trial, this novel is Law and 1800, as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr investigate the shocking murder of a young woman who everyone—and no one—seemed to know.
At the start of a new century, a shocking murder transfixes Manhattan, forcing bitter rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to work together to save a man from the gallows. 
Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house—and doesn’t come home. Has she eloped? Run away? No one knows—until her body appears in the Manhattan Well.
Her family insists they know who killed her. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. 
But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor….
Aaron Burr’s legal practice can’t finance both his expensive tastes and his ambition to win the 1800 New York elections. To defend Levi Weeks is a double a hefty fee plus a chance to grab headlines.
Alexander Hamilton has his own political aspirations; he isn’t going to let Burr monopolize the public’s attention. If Burr is defending Levi Weeks, then Hamilton will too. As the trial and the election draw near, Burr and Hamilton race against time to save a man’s life—and destroy each other.
Part murder mystery, part thriller, part true crime, The Girl From Greenwich Street revisits a dark corner of history—with a surprising twist ending that reveals the true story of the woman at the center of the tale.

My Review:

This fascinating combination of historical fiction, true crime AND mystery tells the story of the first sensational murder trial in what was then, in 1800, these new United States. We don’t know much about the victim, Elma Sands. They didn’t then, either, which is kind of the point. Sometimes it’s still the point. Trying a case in the press doesn’t require much knowledge of either the victim or the accused, then or now.

But the case – this case is still notorious over 200 years later.

First, because it was the first. Firsts always have a bit of cachet. Seconds, not so much. This wasn’t just the first murder trial, it was also the first such trial to have a full transcript. And if you’re thinking that Pitman shorthand wasn’t introduced until 1837, decades after this trial, you’d be right.

But shorthand did not emerge, fully formed, from the head of Isaac Pitman. The court record for this trial practiced an earlier version of shorthand, and recorded the trial verbatim, admittedly with a few idiosyncrasies.

What makes this case still fascinating, perhaps even more so than it has been over the intervening centuries, are the names of two of the three members of the council for the defence. You know them. Once I name them you won’t be able to see them without filtering that image through their portrayals in Hamilton. (This trial is even alluded to in the play in the fast-talking lyrics of “Non-Stop.”

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton acted as two-thirds of the defense of Levi Weeks, the man accused of murdering Elma Sands. I’m not saying they formed a team, because that’s a HUGE stretch. By 1800, those two towering figures of American history were at odds. And they were over the course of the trial as well, each attempting to use the notoriety of the trial to further their respective causes in the upcoming election of 1800. Each doing their best and worst so score off against the other because they could – and couldn’t bear not to.

That a young woman was dead and a young man’s life hung in the balance never stopped these lifelong enemies from taking pieces out of each other even while their client languished behind bars and the press raised a hue and cry over ALL their heads.

Escape Rating A-: Of all the books I’ve read this week, this is the one I found the most fascinating and the one I’ve shoved at the most people. It’s a captivating story, sometimes in spite of itself, because of the way that it combines U.S. history and politics, mystery, true crime and the still inspirational voice of the play Hamilton and weaves it together into a compelling mess of a story.

I call the story a mess not because the author didn’t do a terrific job of making it all make as much sense as it’s ever going to – because she absolutely did. But rather, the historical record itself is really, seriously messy as a murder investigation and as a legal case, the question of who really done it has NEVER been resolved, the circumstances under which the case was conducted are basically insane, and the only available evidence for anything at all – except of course for the dead body – are entirely circumstantial and don’t hang together into any cohesive narrative.

Which is why no one ever hung for the crime.

The story, in the end, is at the intersection of two clichés. One, attributed to Mark Twain in multiple iterations, is the one that goes, “The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.” Even today, reading the story, the mind cries out for a logical conclusion, but there’s not enough there to come to one. Which leads to the other screaming cliché, the one where “assume makes an ass out of you and me”. There are a LOT of asses here. It seems as if all the attempts at making sense of this thing, both then and now, start with an assumption that doesn’t hold up.

But as fascinating as the truly messy trial process is, between the in-over-his-head-and-drowning-fast prosecutor and the resulting exhaustion of the judge, the jury and everyone involved, what makes the story sing (pardon the irresistible pun) is the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr. The transcription of the trial does not indicate which of the three defense lawyers made which statements or asked which witnesses which questions. Nor are there any records of Burr’s and Hamilton’s arguments over how the defense should proceed in the days before the trial. But the heated discussions and the hidden thoughts between the rivals feel true to the characters we believe we know – even if or especially because we’re hearing them in Leslie Odom Jr.’s and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voices.

Particularly as we hear in those voices the echo of Hamilton’s words to Burr over and under their every debate about justice versus expediency, “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”

#BookReview: A Scandalous Affair by Leonard Goldberg

#BookReview: A Scandalous Affair by Leonard GoldbergA Scandalous Affair: A Daughter of Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Leonard Goldberg
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Daughter of Sherlock Holmes #8
Pages: 272
Published by Pegasus Crime on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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In the latest Daughter of Sherlock Holmes novel, Joanna Holmes must confront a shocking case of blackmail that threatens the highest levels of His Majesty’s government, as this USA Today bestselling mystery series continues.

In the latest installment of this acclaimed series, Sherlock Holmes’s daughter faces an elaborate mystery that threatens the second most powerful man in His Majesty’s government. His position is such that he answers only to the king and the prime minister.

During the height of the Great War, Joanna Holmes and the Watsons receive a late-night, clandestine visit from Sir William Radcliffe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who brings with him an agonizing tale of blackmail; a case so sensitive that it can only be spoken of in the confines of 221B Baker Street.

An unknown individual has come into possession of salacious photographs, which not only sullies the family name, but may force the chancellor to vacate his seat on the War Council where his advice is most needed. The blackmailer has in their possession revealing photographs that show Sir William’s granddaughter in romantic encounters with a man other than the aristocrat to whom she is engaged to marry. Should the pictures be released to the public, the wedding would be immediately called off, and the prospect of the granddaughter ever finding a suitable husband would vanish.

Sir William's family has been forced to pay exorbitant sums for several of the photographs, but even more salacious pictures remain in the blackmailer’s possession—and will no doubt carry greater demands and threats. Scotland Yard cannot be involved, for fear of public disclosure. It thus falls on the shoulders of Joanna and the Watsons to expose the blackmailer and procure the photographs before irreparable harm comes to the chancellor and his family.

My Review:

The affair, in fact, was considerably more scandalous than first presented – and that situation was plenty salacious enough.

All the more so as this eighth entry in The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series takes place during the winter of 1918, as German bombs are dropping all over London. The United States had entered the war mere months before, and the Germans were hoping to break the back of the Allies before the U.S. could bring their far superior numbers to bear. History knows how that worked for both sides, but in the winter of 1918, the residents of London sheltering in basements and Underground stations certainly did not.

A scandal at the highest levels had the potential to rock a government that needed stability and clear thinking to wrap up the “Great War”. So when Mrs. Joanna Blalock Watson, along with the Doctors Watson, her husband and father-in-law, were called to the home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on a case, they all knew it had to be an important one.

Or at least a case that has importance because of who is caught up in its web. The Exchequer controls the purse strings of the empire, visiting a scandal upon the Chancellor’s own household will have far-reaching consequences – even if the scandal itself is merely the exposure of a reckless young woman’s thoughtless behavior.

Because her illustrious grandfather is being blackmailed to keep her scandal out of the press. One salacious photograph – and 5,000 pounds sterling – at a time. (That’s $100,000 in today’s money and the amount was for a single installment of which many more were sure to come.)

At first the case seems not simple but at least obvious. The young woman in the photos appears to be just a bit ‘out of it’, whether due to the unwitting consumption of too much champagne or the unknowing ingestion of the early 20th century equivalent of ‘date rape’ drugs. She appears to have been posed in various compromising positions without any awareness of the hidden camera capturing her ‘shame’.

It’s only as Joanna digs deeper into the case that she learns that very little of what she’s been presented with is as it first appears – and that none of the narrators of the tale with which she’s been presented have been remotely reliable.

And that the spider at the heart of this web has been playing a much longer game than even the Great Detective himself might have imagined.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up this week because I’ve read the whole series so far (I am STILL a sucker for a Holmes story), and while I’ve had mixed feelings, on balance I’ve generally liked the stories – usually with a few quibbles along the way. And this week I’m still battling a cold that just won’t go away so I was looking for a story that I’d be able to get into from the outset and knew that this would fill that bill admirably.

As it mostly did.

The mystery was certainly more than twisty enough – even though AND especially because it was clear from the outset that the young lady in the photos was holding back information that Joanna would need to solve the mystery. Although most of that turned out to be unwitting because, well, she was. Or at least extremely naive. Or both. Definitely both.

Because the young woman is intended as the victim, I felt like I was supposed to feel for her. And I did at first, but in the end I didn’t. It’s not that she was foolish, because that happens. And she certainly was very foolish. But she was also very complicit, and that’s when I stopped feeling for her as much as the story wants the reader to feel. Because it all felt like the problems of the rich and she’s going to be well taken care of no matter how responsible she is for the mess she’s gotten her family into. It felt like the case was only important because its exposure would cost her grandfather his position, which was only of such supreme importance as it was because of the war. And I wish the story had gone down that path because it would have made more sense.

At the same time, the true villain of this piece was a very smart, very small, very grey little man who was clearly a sociopath. He was so nondescript as an individual that his evil was much, much bigger than he was – to the point where I don’t know how he contained it all. Also, he remained so much in the shadows that we only get glimmers of a sense of his nature through his acts and it just wasn’t enough.

Not that it wasn’t interesting and different to have a tiny little figure be such a towering villain – so to speak – and not that it’s not good to see something different in villainy than a whole lot of bwa-ha-ha monologues and grandstanding, but he really was a bit of a whimper even though he was really, really adept at making other people whimper.

In the end, this wasn’t bad at all, and I did get caught up in it more than enough to ignore my cold for a couple of hours, but it didn’t reach the heights of either the first book in the series, The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes, or my other favorite, the next most recent book, The Wayward Prince.

But I was more than entertained enough that I’ll be back for the next outing in this series, whatever and whenever it turns out to be!

A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird

A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBirdThe Serpent Under (A Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6
Pages: 375
Published by Collins Crime Club, HarperCollins on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Holmes and Watson face treachery and danger in the latest full-length thriller by Bonnie MacBird, author of the bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel Art in the Blood . Murder, jealousy, and deceit underscore three interlocking mysteries as Holmes and Watson take on a high profile case at Windsor Castle, a boy drowned in the Serpentine, and a crusading women’s rights activist who suspects a traitor in her organisation. The cases send them into danger into locales as varied as the palace itself, a dockland cannery, an arts and crafts atelier, and a gypsy encampment. But is there peril underfoot as well – right at 221B Baker Street? The twisting, breathlessly plotted conjoined mysteries that Bonnie MacBird is known for provide a thrill ride that will delight Sherlockians worldwide.

My Review:

There are a whole lot of serpents in this latest entry in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series (after What Child is This?), of the reptilian as well as the human kind. A disconcerting number of them end up dead – again of both kinds – in this mystery that includes a surprisingly high body count for a detective who keeps his partner around, at least in part, because it’s Watson who is good with a gun.

On the other hand, there’s a BOMB, and those always cause a lot of collateral damage.

It begins with a dead body – as so many of the best mysteries do. The ‘Palace’ comes calling at 221b Baker Street, in the ‘person’ of a royal carriage and a coachman fully prepared to whisk Holmes and Watson off to Windsor Castle, whether they have other plans or not.

Which, come to think of it, describes more than a little about how this case progresses. The ‘high and mighty’ – and not just those at court – believe they can drag Sherlock Holmes around, order him to provide solutions at times of their choosing, all the while refusing to answer his questions so that he can FIND those solutions.

It’s both fun and frustrating, both for Holmes and for the reader, as we’re used to seeing him as the master of his domain – because he generally was. But this Holmes is still in his early 30s and isn’t quite there yet. He’s still at the ‘faking it until he makes it’ stage more than a bit. But he’s getting there and this reader at least is wondering if cases like this one are what gave him the push to get there as fast as possible.

I digress, but only a bit. I’ll do it again later.

The Palace has commandeered Holmes because they’ve got a nasty puzzle on their hands and need to get it solved before the circumstances get out – as they inevitably will. One of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting was found at Windsor, stone-cold dead and seemingly the victim of suicide.

And that’s the way the Palace Guard wants to play it – so they can bury it and her as fast as possible. Literally sweep the dead woman under the rug.

The problem is that Miss Jane Wandley was extensively and extremely professionally tattooed just before her death. With a snake. Two snakes, actually, both eating their own tails in the ouroboros form, including a significant amount of the tattoo on her face with the heads of the snakes inked on top of her head and hidden under her artfully dressed hair.

She didn’t do THAT to herself. She didn’t kill herself either, as Holmes easily proves in spite of the palace functionaries having cleaned and moved the corpse and the crime scene while destroying an unconscionable amount of evidence.

And it is from that shocking point that the case sends out tendrils and tentacles (yes, I know that snakes don’t have tentacles but it still fits) as well as a whole lot of deadly fangs and death rattles all over the country as Holmes looks into every nook and cranny and snake’s nest to figure out who the real snake in this case is and what part of their own past tail, or tale, they are attempting to eat in their utter destruction of Jane Wandley and her entire family.

Escape Rating A-: The ouroboros image, that snake eating its own tail, turned out to be the perfect metaphor for this book! At the center of this insane mystery is a plot – and a pain – that twists through the story and back on itself – even as it reaches into the long ago but clearly not dead enough past of its perpetrator as well as its many victims.

Even as it also twists through some fascinating bits of history, as this takes place as the Victorian Era is winding towards its inevitable close while the fruits of the Industrial Revolution shape what is to come – and a bit of what comes in this mystery as well.

The Wandley family, as the current victims of this insane mess of a case, represent the crossroads between the old and the new. Jane seems to have been a paragon of the old female virtues even if she was a bit of a tyrant – or especially because. But her younger sister is VERY active in the women’s suffrage movement, while her brother is an artist working for Christie’s auction house and gallery – then an influential force in the lucrative Arts & Crafts artistic movement and still extant today.

The design inked on Jane’s face was drawn by her brother Clarence for Christie’s, while the women’s rights group that her sister Kate belongs to has been the target of a snake of its own, setting them up for violent encounters with the police designed to discredit their movement as a gaggle of hysterical females.

While it’s clear to both Holmes and the reader that someone has it out for the Wandley family, it’s only when he dives deeply into the past that he is able to follow the twisted path of an even more twisted mind to find the dark beginning to this old, cold plan for revenge.

This case, like the previous cases in this series, is every bit as twisty and even confounding as those of the original canon. Howsomever, what makes this variation interesting in its own right is just how much it owes to more recent portrayals of this archetypical duo.

Through Watson’s eyes, we’re allowed to see a bit more of what makes Holmes tick – and occasionally, pardon the pun, tock. Because Holmes is portrayed as being neuroatypical – even if it wasn’t called that in his time – and being aware that he marches to the beat of a slightly different drummer. Just as Watson is aware that Holmes needs him as a sounding board and audience even if he never takes Watson’s advice. Occasionally, Watson doesn’t take Holmes’ advice either, as they both demonstrate in this case.

Also, one of the things that is clear if you go back and read the original stories with a fresh eye, is that Holmes in the original was very much a man of his time – with all the predilections and prejudices thereof. In the case of The Serpent Under, as has been true for the other books in this series, we observe Holmes in situations that make it clear that this Holmes has been written a bit more for our time in his respect for people that late Victorian society did look down upon with extreme prejudice. He never leaps to what would have been the easy conclusion about the perpetrator of this particular case, that either the Roma people did it, or were at least guilty of something that precipitated it, that Clarence Wandley or his male lover were responsible purely because they are homosexual, or that Kate Wandley must have caused it all because women’s rights advocates are all hysterical. Or even worse, that Jane Wandley must have provoked her own murder merely because she was female.

There’s none of that and it makes the case that much more complicated because this Holmes does not succumb to taking any of the easy ways out.

I did say I’d digress one more time before I close, and that digression regards the timeline of this series. The original Holmes stories were not published in chronological order, and this series does not seem to be either. Which led me to a deep dive about when they were set and whether or not Mrs. Mary Watson (née Morstan) was still alive at this particular point in time. Which she was but Watson never mentions why he seems to be rooming with Holmes at 221b while he’s got a wife somewhere. Previous books have at least mentioned the poor woman being off visiting relatives!

The second part of my timeline digression has to do with one of the usually fixed points in the Holmesian timeline. Specifically, Holmes’ encounter with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, which took place April 24-May 4, 1891. That’s barely a month after this story takes place, but there isn’t even a Moriarty in sight in this particular interpretation. Which means that I’m wondering really, really hard about just how that’s all going to work out in the next book. If it does at all. We’ll certainly see in the hopefully not too distant future.

Of course, this Holmes’ Moriarty might have been encountered in the one earlier books I haven’t read yet,  The Three Locks. (I absolutely cannot believe that Vidocq is Moriarty. If THAT turns out to be the case I need to go out and buy a hat so I can eat it!) Clearly I need to find out post haste. Which means I’ll be picking up that book even sooner than I thought!

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen Spotswood

Grade A #BookReview: Dead in the Frame by Stephen SpotswoodDead in the Frame: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #5
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday on February 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The most dramatic installment yet in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost and Parker series, as Will scrambles to solve a shocking murder before Lillian takes the fall for the crime.

NEW YORK CITY, 1947: Wealthy financier and ghoulish connoisseur of crime, Jessup Quincannon, is dead, and famed detective Lillian Pentecost is under arrest for his murder. Means, motive, and a mountain of evidence leave everyone believing she's guilty. Everyone, that is, except Willowjean “Will” Parker, who knows for a fact her boss is innocent. She just doesn’t know if she can prove it.

With Lillian locked away in the House of D–New York City’s infamous women’s prison–Will is left to root out the real killer. Was it a member of Quincannon’s murder-obsessed Black Museum Club? Maybe it was his jilted lover? Or his beautiful, certainly-sociopathic bodyguard? And what about the mob hit-man who just happened to disappear after the shots were fired?

With the city barreling toward the trial of the century, each day brings fresh headlines and hints of long-buried scandals from Lillian’s past. Will is desperate to get her boss out from behind bars before her reputation is destroyed. Because the House of D is no kind place, especially for a woman with multiple sclerosis. Or one with so many enemies. Her health failing and targeted by someone who wants her dead, Lillian needs to survive long enough to take the stand.

With time running out on both sides of the prison walls, Will and Lillian must wager everything to uncover who put their thumb on the scales and a bullet in Quincannon’s head. Before Lady Justice brings her sword down, ending Pentecost and Parker's adventures once and for all.

My Review:

The Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in 1939.

This fifth entry in the Pentecost and Parker series begins with celebrated, hated, envied, feared, private investigator Lillian Pentecost on her way to the Women’s House of Detention at 6th Avenue near West 9th Street in New York City, under arrest for a murder that she surely did not commit.

Not that either the NYPD or the criminal justice system can see their way to that conclusion – at least not yet. The frame around Pentecost fits much too well, and there are too many people in the NYPD who have been itching to see this successful, intelligent woman fall. Of course the press is having a literal field day because everyone loves a scandal, and people especially love seeing the high and mighty cut down to size.

Pentecost’s right-hand woman, Willowjean Parker, comes back from her first-ever vacation to find her boss in handcuffs, their property being ransacked, and cops and reporters besieging the place. It seems as if the entire city wants a piece of Lillian Pentecost – only because they do.

This is the job that Will Parker has been training for, to become the lead investigator of Pentecost and Parker Investigations. That has been inevitable from the very first, marvelous book in this series, Fortune Favors the Dead, when Pentecost took Parker on as her assistant. Not because she wanted an assistant, but because Lillian Pentecost had been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she knew that her time as the lead investigator of her own agency was inevitably running out.

Now that it has, possibly temporarily but certainly abruptly, while Pentecost is behind bars and bail has been denied, it’s up to Will to ask herself what Lillian Pentecost would do – and do it. No matter how high the deck is stacked against them both. Pentecost is depending on her, and Willowjean Parker will not be found wanting. Whatever it takes.

Escape Rating A: The entire Pentecost and Parker series has been an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride from the very beginning in Fortune Favors the Dead, through Murder Under Her Skin, Secrets Typed in Blood, Murder Crossed her Mind and now this latest page-turner, Dead in the Frame.

What initially drew me into this series was its homage to a classic mystery series that isn’t talked about much anymore, and that’s the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. A series which I fully admit probably doesn’t wear well in the 21st century for all sorts of reasons.

But the concept of the Wolfe series was a partnership between an older detective who mostly refuses to leave his New York City brownstone and his younger assistant who does all the legwork and brings the case back to his boss. In the case of Pentecost and Parker, as the series began Pentecost was aware that she SHOULD be sticking to her brownstone, but can’t make herself do it as much as her doctor would prefer.

On the one hand, Pentecost and Parker are very much in the style of the noir fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, and Parker’s first-person chronicles of the cases resembles Wolfe’s junior partner Archie Goodwin in style and often substance. Howsomever, the lens through which Parker sees the world is VERY different from Goodwin’s. Parker is both female and queer, and grew up in as far over the wrong side of the tracks as possible as she literally ran away and joined the circus.

(If you’ve enjoyed Pentecost and Parker and you’re curious about their antecedents, the first book in the Nero Wolfe series is Fer-de-Lance. If you’re looking for a readalike for Pentecost and Parker, take a look at Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen.)

This particular entry in the series does a fantastic job of straddling the line between Parker’s now and ours, speaking both to the case itself and the reasons for it while at the same time using that vehicle to highlight issues that are very much a part of our present. Including, but very much not limited to, the way that Pentecost is tried in the press LONG before her actual trial because there are just so many powers-that-be that can’t bear to see a woman be independent, successful and show them up when they deserve it.

After taking a couple of days to think about this one, I think that what’s at the heart of this entry in the story is the issue of inevitability and the human response to knowing that an ending is coming. In a way, it’s all about, to paraphrase the poet Dylan Thomas, not going gently into that good night, and the form that the rage against the dying of the light takes. It’s about the conflict between revenge being a dish best served as cold as, and from, the grave versus “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

All of that may seem a bit on the philosophical side, but it’s in there. And so is an absolutely cracking good mystery that sends both of our detectives through walks in the valley of the shadow of death and brings the inevitable changes that Pentecost has been staving off for years much closer much faster than her early hopes would have had it.

I have to say that the parts of this story where Pentecost is in the Women’s House of Detention are harrowing and also feel much too real – as the House of D most certainly was. Her treatment while incarcerated was entirely too typical of the treatment of prisoners in that nightmare of a place, and we go through that nightmare with her and feel her get both scared and scarred by it.

I was utterly caught up in the mystery, as I have been with every single one of their cases so far. I knew Pentecost was innocent but couldn’t see how she was going to get out from under – and for the longest time neither did she or Parker and it ratcheted the tension up to 11 the entire way.

The one thing that kept niggling at me is probably a result of my 21st century perspective having a disconnect with her post WW2 circumstances. I certainly understand why she hated the victim, and vice versa. But the information he was holding over Pentecost wasn’t about her, it was about her parents. I understand why no one would want that history dug up, but not why it was such a potentially huge scandal for Pentecost herself. Whatever the truth of that old matter, she herself can’t possibly be guilty of any of it as she was a child at the time. I expect to see that mess resolved, or at least as resolved as the dead past can be, in the next book in this series. Because that’s the story that Lillian Pentecost herself promised to work on next!