A brutal string of ritualistic killings terrorizes a city already shaken by economic and political turmoil in this chilling new historical mystery from C. S. Harris, USA Today bestselling author of Who Will Remember.
London, 1816: When a notorious young aristocrat is burned alive on a windswept hill popular with neo-Druids, former cavalry officer Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, finds himself plunged into a murder investigation shadowed by tales of ancient human sacrifices and long-buried secrets.
The victim, Marcus Toole, was the only son and heir of a prominent nobleman. His closest friend—Sebastian’s own nephew, Bayard—claims to have passed out drunk before the attack and remembers nothing. But when Sebastian and his brilliant wife, Hero, delve deeper into the sordid activities of Bayard and his friends, they come to realize that Bayard may not be as innocent as he pretends. Following a tangled trail that leads from a disaffected former soldier-turned-highwayman to a beautiful, courageous journalist and a Jamaican-born fencing master with ties to a radical political movement, Sebastian begins to suspect that Bayard and his friends are being targeting in revenge, by victims who believe they have no other recourse.
Then two more of Bayard’s friends are killed, their murders staged to echo the ritual sacrifices of the ancient Celts. With the palace shaken by the fear of riots and one horrifying death following another, Sebastian must race to stop a ruthless plot that threatens the lives of innocents and could rip his troubled nation apart.

My Review:

In the fall of 1816, when this 21st book in the Sebastian St. Cyr series opens, Regent’s Park was new – and mostly vacant – and Primrose Hill was outside even the outskirts of London. Also outside the bounds in other ways, as recently revived interest in Druidic myths and legends – and the scams that inevitably grew up around them – seemed to center in the area.

The story itself opens as St. Cyr’s nephew, Bayard, bursts into his grandfather’s study in a search for Devlin himself. Bayard needs the assistance that only his uncle can provide. Because Devlin investigates murders – much to the disgust of Bayard’s mother, Devlin’s older sister – and Bayard has just run away from the site of a friend’s murder.

A murder that looks an awful lot like one of those Druidic sacrifices that so many people are suddenly so interested in.

But Bayard isn’t in such a lather because he ran away from the scene of a crime and fears any consequences for that act whatsoever. After all, Bayard is “the Right Honorable Bayard Wilcox, Thirteenth Lord Wilcox” and he knows full well that no one is going to visit any consequences on the likes of him.

Except possibly the murderer, as the smoking log that used to be his friend Marcus Toole isn’t the first of Bayard’s friends to die in mysterious – and possibly sacrificial – circumstances. Bayard fears for his own life – and so he should. Because it’s starting to look to Devlin as if Bayard’s chickens have finally come home to roost – and that some of those chickens have turned out to be hawks.

But there are vultures circling overhead, as the hue and cry in the press over the sensational deaths of a pack of young lords and lordlings has to be calmed down. The government doesn’t care ‘whodunnit’; their only interest is in spinning the crime – and the punishment – to protect its own agenda. Even if the guilty are lionized by the press and only the innocents are condemned. Unless Devlin can stall the encircling raptors long enough to save those who can still be saved – even from themselves.

Escape Rating A+: I’m a bit early with this one, but I simply couldn’t resist. Last week’s reviews ended with two marvelous A+ mysteries, Legacy of the Dead and The Politician, and I went scrabbling through the virtually towering TBR pile for a book that would be in the same spirit and deliver the same chills and thrills AND compulsion to find out ‘whodunnit’ and how and why it was done. I knew that St. Cyr would deliver, because he’d already done just that through 20 books and I expected this 21st book to be every bit as much of a compelling read as its predecessors – and it absolutely was.

As with many of the books in this series, this is a story about the corruption of power and the well-known and oft-proven saying that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. In this particular entry in the series, that truism is multiplied and even exacerbated by two other equally correct aphorisms, the one about the apple not falling far from the tree, and the one about those who don’t remember the past being condemned to repeat it – even if the latter phrase won’t be coined for nearly another century.

This is a story that begins and ends in darkness. It’s not just that the murder occurs on a dark – if not stormy – night, but that the circumstances that surround it are dark, the implications – and revelations – for St. Cyr’s family are dark, and the entire world is shrouded in darkness.

That last bit is literal, as this story takes place in the autumn of 1816, the famous – and historically quite real – ‘Year Without at Summer’. Crops have failed all over Europe, food prices have risen beyond the average person’s ability to pay, people are dying of starvation and/or freezing to death all over the country, and that’s only the beginning of the devastation. The Napoleonic Wars have finally ended, as have Britain’s ambitions to take back the former American Colonies, and ALL the surviving soldiers have returned home to add to the unemployment rolls.

Meanwhile the government is cutting back every expense except the Prince Regent’s excesses, and calling it austerity when that’s obviously a hypocritical lie. It’s no longer just avowed ‘Radicals’ calling for vast, sweeping change in how the country is governed, because there are too many people who have nothing left to lose and know precisely who to blame for most of the problem. (No one at the time knew the cause of the sudden lack of summer in 1816 – nor did they know that 1817, 1818 and even 1819 weren’t going to be much better.)

There is so much ‘Radical’ foment that the Crown, in the person of “Prinny”, and those who are propping him up, in the (fictional) person of Lord Jarvis but also in the historical personage of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth among others, were seeding ‘agents provocateurs’ among the Radicals in order to start riots and then ruthlessly suppress the movement. They feared a French Revolution in Britain that would sweep all of them to a hangman’s noose – if not a guillotine. And they were not wrong to fear such an outcome under the circumstances.

Even though their methods were utterly appalling and often outright criminal in themselves. But history is written by the victors, which they were because they held all the levers of power and used them ruthlessly.

It’s into this tenuous situation that Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is called to investigate a murder scene. By his nephew, who is caught in the thick of the mess. Someone is killing lords and lordlings just like Devlin’s nephew Bayard, men who know that no one will call them to account for any misbehavior – even criminal misdeeds – as long as they confine their depredations to the “lower classes”.

The more Devlin learns about the crimes committed by his nephew and his friends, the more sympathy Devlin – and the reader – have for their victims. Justice seems to be getting served – even if it is vigilante justice. BUT the government needs a scapegoat for the crimes – and they don’t care who gets hanged as long as someone does AND if they can use that hanging to take out a Radical or two. Meanwhile, the murder spree expands from Devlin’s nephew and his aristocratic pack of wolves (even though that comparison is an insult to wolves), to their victims.

What makes this series so endlessly fascinating – and why I keep coming back to it over and over again – is that they take the exact opposite tack from the glittering portrait of the Regency that we read in Georgette Heyer’s stories and even Jane Austen, or stories like the Bridgerton series.

Because it wasn’t nearly as bright as the popular imagery would make it. The way that we tend to think of history as being made up of separate periods obscures the fact that the glittering Regency and the blood and mud of the Napoleonic Wars took place at the same time. That Britain was in economic shambles when the war ended, that there was a huge wealth gap that kept getting wider, AND that people were starving and freezing because the climate went crazy.

Devlin, and his wife Hero, are characters who straddle both worlds. They were both born into the halls of power and privilege, but their life experiences have permitted – or required – them to see that the world is not all glitter and that their aristocratic peers are no better – and frequently much worse – than anyone in the supposed ‘lower classes’ they believe they are superior to. They are outsiders from both sides, and it makes them excellent observers and investigators.

This entry in the series is particularly fascinating because it doesn’t shy away from either the way that privilege enables terrible villainy, the way that war brings out the worst in those who are already villainous, and the way that privilege warps even the most upright of people. At the same time, the series as a whole dives deeply into the motives of the powers-that-be on a broader level, shows just how the sausage of government and politics and the press are made and reinforce each other, and how defense of the status quo operates in service of protecting its own privileges first – no matter that defense is dressed up in patriotism and stability.

And it always tells a cracking good story, through characters that are endlessly fascinating to follow. I look forward, as eagerly as ever, to Devlin’s next adventure, hopefully this time next year.

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.