A Terrible Beauty

Warning, spoilers for And Only to Deceive

The Moonstone, widely acknowledged as the fist mystery novel, used multiple points of view. The convention fell out of fashion in the 20th Century, but when done well adds background without resorting to excessive exposition.  Tasha Alexander uses the convention well, and also avoids making the returned dead spots trope convincing.

A Terrible Beauty begins with Phillip, Viscount Ashton's funeral.  Dressed in deep Victorian mourning, Lady Emily can hide her ambivalence for the husband she barely knew.  A decade later, happily married to Phillip's best friend Colin Hargraves, Emily receives a postcard sent to the Viscountess Ashton.  Is it a joke?  Or is Phillip still alive/  Emily hears his name on a trip tot he zoo with her sons, and then thinks she sees him in Athens en route to Santorini, where she, Colin, and her American classicist friend Margaret Michales plan to distract her friend Jeremy, Duke of Cambridge from his grief over his disastrous engagement.  Any doubts Emily has about the ghosts of her past disappear when she arrives at her villa, because Phillip arrived ahead of her - with a dead man.

Phillip, it turns out, did not die when poisoned by an associate while on safari in Africa, or so he claims.  He'd actually fallen into a deep coma and had been saved by a tribesman who substituted an actual corpse for the funeral, then nursed him back to health.  Two years later, he found his way to Munich and tried tor claim his identity.  Banks don't give monty do dead men, so he would have been stuck if he hadn't been befriended by a sympathetic German archaeologist.  Eventually, the amateur becomes a professional, and under the name Phillip Chapman discovered a bronze which may have belonged to Achilles.

His story convinces Emily and Colin, at least at first. He looks like Phillip, and with few photographs and the passage of a decade, he can explain away any doubts.  He's also being chased by a man out steal the Achilles bronze, even if it means killing Phillip.  this leaves two mysteries for Emily and Colin to solve, and with the help of Phillip's retrospective memories, I solved both about the same time as they did (although I didn't see the final twist until I read it).  A Terrible Beauty is one of the best entries in a generally good but occasionally uneven series