The Turn of Midnight

 Minnette Walters couldn't have known. She published The Last Hours in 2017 and Turn of Midnight in 201. How could she have known that in 2020, shortly after I read her novel of plague survival, that COVID-19 would shut down the world? Normally, I would have read The Turn of Midnight shortly after The Last Hours but in March of 2020 I didn't have the concentration tor had any book, let alone one about a plague. The two books fit together so well, though, that I recommend reading them back to back.

The Turn of Midnight begins immediately after The Last Hours Develish has survived the plague and men are approaching. It's not an invasion, but Thaddeus Thurkill and the five youths who've been scouting for signs of life returning with sheep taken from an abandoned village. On their next trip, they're set upon by a local lord and his men. Somehow, after the boys kill his men ant Thaddeus humiliates him, the lord agrees to return to Develish where he sees the wisdom of Lady Anne's ways. He returns to is manor, with the late Sir Richard's steward Hugh (the only person who opposes Lady Anne's ways) while Thaddeus masquerades as a lord and Anne's kinsman and the five young men as his retinue, searching for Lady Eleanor's abandoned dowry and signs of life.

 Eventually, Thaddeus and his retinue reach a manor where Hugh has told the steward that "Lord Athelstan" is actually a bastard serf named Thaddeus, turning the final third of the book into a combination of conspiracy and courtroom drama. Thaddeus's calmness, Lady Anne's intelligence, the sigils of both their retinues, and Walters's deft writing provide a believable and satisfying conclusion.

The Last White Rose

 In her author's note, Alison Weir says historical records tell us what happened but don't show the conversations or personalities. Weir is both a biographer and novelist and The Last White Rose is the fiction companion to her biography of Elizabeth of York.

We first meet Elizabeth as a 5 year old feeing into sanctuary during the Wars of the Roses. Her father, Edward IV, eventually triumphs and she, her mother, two sisters, and the newborn heir return to their life of luxury. Bessy adores her splendid father, but as she approaches her tenses he sees him age prematurely. She also watches as relations with her favorite uncle, Richard of Gloucester, decline.

When she was 17, the family once gain returns to sanctuary. Edward IV is dead and Richard has taken Edward V hostage before usurping the throne and allegedly killing his two nephews. Bessy finds herself her family's backbone, caring for her sisters and trying to temper the conspiracy-tinged rants of her mother. Here, I think Weir could have shown a better transition from the calm regal queen to the paranoid captive. We don't see the Queen's point of view, so maybe she was a bit suspicious from the start but it's a bit jarring. During this captivity, Bessy still hopes to marry Henry Tudor but willingly accepts the advances of her uncle Richard whose queen is dying of tuberculosis. Simultaneously, she plots with Lord Stanley, Henry's stepfather, to help with Henry's invasion. Richard and Henry meet on Bosworth and Henry becomes Henry VII.

Henry's claim tot he throne was tenuous, but he won his crown on the battlefield so it shouldn't matter. Still, his marriage to the heir of the Yorkist King should, ,in the dowager queen's eyes, make them co-regnants. Henry disagrees and Bessy, more concerned with bearing and supervising the upbringing of their children, doesn't object. What does vex her is Henry's parsimony and (warranted) suspicions. He's challenged by two pretenders and a feeble minded cousin of Bessy's and she can't agree with his imprisonment of her feeble minded relative. She objects, but cannot act.

Still, their marriage is happy and Bessy loves her children...except, perhaps, Arthur. She regrets her inability to bond with him - when he was a premature infant, frail child, or a boy installed in a distant palace. She questions whether he's healthy enough to marry Catherine of Aragon, and henry admits that perhaps he two should live apart after consummating the marriage. That act, which years later led to the Great Matter, most likely never happened and Arthur dies of tuberculosis a few months later. And his mother mourns.

Arthur's death leaves the succession less secure. Elizabeth's prior pregnancy had been difficult, but she and Henry decide to have another child. in giving birth to her seventh child, a girl named Katherine who died soon after, Elizabeth sealed her fate. As she hemorrhages and dies, she sees the faces of her loved ones who died before her. Weir uses this trope in most of her novels and it's effective if wearing a bit thin. Other than that, The Last White Rose effectively fleshes out the frame of Elizabeth of York

Mr. Churchill's Secretary

I love used books. Besides seeing how cover art and typefaces have changed over the years, they're a good way to find new authors and series. They're cheaper so I'm likely to take a chance, and sometimes I start a series that already has several installments. I took a chance on Susan Elia MacNeal and bought the first two books in her Maggie Hope series. The chance paid off - Mr. Churchill's Secretary was a fun, fast-paced read.

Mathematician Maggie Hope first traveled to London to sell her grandmother's house so she could pay her graduate tuition at MIT. Unfortunately, the house was a decaying Victorian pile so she stayed in London, fixing up the house and supporting herself through tutoring and renting rooms to friends. Once Britain entered WWII, she realized she wanted to stay. 

A few months into the war, Maggie's friend David calls her. David is an intelligence analyst (a job Maggie interviewed for but did not get because they hire men from the 'right' schools, not women with mathematical abilities). One of Churchill's typists has been murdered and they need a replacement. Maggie agrees to take the job and between taking dictation and typing speeches finds a hidden German code which links Maggie's story to the subplot involving a German sleeper agent who's in communication with a radical Irish separatist. These threads also connect to Maggie's search for information about her parents who died when she was a toddler. The last third of the book is a series of action scenes, revealed identities, and last minute rescues. While exciting, it did feel like the book could have ended multiple times. This, and the level of exposition needed to introduce a dozen characters (possibly necessary for a first book but still distracting) bring the book down a bit, but I enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next installment.

The Land Beyond the Sea

I love Sharon Kay Penman's sprawling novels which combine medieval politics with the love stories between intelligent and strong willed characters. She was meticulous in her research, but the dearth of personal history (and for women, even royal women, sparse records in general) gave her the freedom to create complex and believable personal interactions.

The Land Beyond the Sea refers to Jerusalem in the late 12th Century. The novel opens with Almaric rejecting his wife Agnes in order to succeed his brother as King of Jerusalem and barring her from contact with their two children. Almaric's reign is short and he's soon succeeded by his 13-year-old son Baldwin, known as the Leper King.

Today, leprosy is a treatable bacterial infection but 900 years ago, it was a certain death, so we know Baldwin's life will be short (he died at age 24) and Penman doesn't shy away from showing his physical decline. Intelligent and strong willed, he learns to fight left handed (his right arm experiencing the earliest nerve damage) and control horses with his legs alone and he surrounds himself with good advisors. Still, he knows that as he becomes more infirm his kingdom will dissolve into chaos. He's right, and I found the hundred or so pages after Baldwin's death to be less compelling than the story of his reign. Penman shifts focus to his stepmother Maria and her second husband Balian (the main romance in the novel) and her daughter/Baldwin's half-sister Isabella and their attempts to stabilize the kingdom. Without Baldwin there's no heart and Penman probably should have ended the book with his funeral.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius

 In the Shadow of Vesuvius brings Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily, along with her childhood friends Ivy Brandon and Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, to an archaeological dig in 1901 Pompeii. As so often happens, they come across a much more recently deceased body and find that most of the archeological expedition (including a brother and sister team - she's the archaeologist and he's an artist who draws the uncovered artifacts - the head archaeologist, and the man financing it) are hiding secrets. Another more personal secret turns up as well, in the form of Emily's husband Colin's previously unknown daughter. Fighting jealousy and the feelings of inadequacy Colin's late lover induced in her years ago, Emily eventually uncovers the truth, and saves herself with the aid of a knife carried by the young woman poet whose life in Pompeii shortly before Vesuvius destroyed the city.

The Last Hours

 Trust Minette Walters to make a novel set against the first wave of the Black Death even darker. The Last Hours opened as Sir Richard of Develish prepares to negotiate his daughter Eleanor's marriage to the son of a nearby lord. Sir Richard is a brutal, drunken lout and his vain daughter is no better, frequently venting her cruelty on Thaddeus Thurkell, the bastard sone of one of her father's serfs

Then the plague begins. Sir Richard's retinue falls to it at Bradmayne, and would have brought it to Develish if not for Lady Anne. She ruled the manor through kindness and intelligence, enforcing quarantines and cleanliness so the serfs are healthier (and through her tuition literate) as well as free from the rats we know carried yersinia pests. Lady Anne also had a warning from a messenger, which she altered to prevent panic. With Thaddeus as her new Steward and a council of leading serfs, they lead a peaceful, if anxious life for about two months. then, a mruder and fears of eventual starvation lead Thaddeus and five teenage boys on a mission to find food and news of the outside world. 

From here, Walters uses a dual track narrative. WE see Anne and her council deal with both Eleanor's machinations and dark secrets and with an attack by a marauding lord. Meanwhile, thaddeus and the boys scour the land for supplies and signs of life. For them, it's also a personal journey, with the boys becoming responsible and Thaddeus unknowingly letting his guard down. Walters ends the book on a cliffhanger. Luckily, I already have the sequel so I don't have to wait a year or tow to find out if Anne, Thaddeus, and the council begin to creat a new society in with the scarcity of labor destroys the old feudal system.

Uneasy Lies the Crown

I love Lady Emily Hargraves, and I enjoy the secondary plots Tasha Alexander weaves into the noble sleuth's mysteries. Here, the flashback tale of a recently married noblewoman mistreated by the family caring for her while her husband is on Crusade doesn't influence the main mystery, but the two plot lines meet in the final chapter.

The main plot starts with Queen Victoria's death. During the funeral, Lady Emily's husband, an aide to the late Queen and new King, slips away to investigate the murder of a man dressed as Henry IV. Emily, of course, joins him, and they learn that this is the beginning of a killing spree. Will it include the current King? Alexander is too clever for something so obvious, and she supports the solution well.

The Sunne in Splendour

We were reading Romeo and Juliet, not Richard III, but Sr. Maureen Christi told us that we can't trust Shakespeare's depiction of Richard because he wrote to please his politically savvy patron, Elizabeth. Granddaughter of Richard's deposer, she'd want popular culture to enhance, not diminish, her sometimes questioned reign.  Maybe Sr. Christi had read the recently published The Sunne in Splendour when she told us Richard III probably wasn't quite the villain he'd been made out to be although I doubt it (she said she never read anything unless it had been written at least 20 years earlier, to be sure it was enduring and therefore literature). Still, I wonder, because in 1982 Richard had not yet started the rehabilitation project that tells us now he was a skilled commander with moderate scoliosis who ended up buried under a car park.

Sharon Kay Penman's book wasn't the fist to portray Richard III sympathetically, but unlike Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, she covers Richard's life from age 8, not just his reign and the question of nephews' deaths.  We first meet Richard as a boy awed by his charismatic brother Edward (and we first meet Edward seducing Richard's pretty, red-haired nurse). Sons of the Duke of York, they're on one side of the confusing Wars of the Roses, battling the addled Henry VI and his tactical skilled wife, Margarita of Anjou. She's fighting for her son, the Yorks are fighting for a crown they believe should be theirs, and the Duke of Warwick is fighting for himself.

After an exile forced by Lancaster's victories and the deaths of his father and brother Edmund, Richard comes of age in the glare of his brother Edward's reign.  Ned takes the Sunne in Splendour as his badge after an atmospheric refraction makes it appear there are three suns at the climax of his crown-winning battle, in which Richard shows his tactical skills. He also falls in love with Warwick's daughter, a love apparently thwarted when Warwick switches sides, along with Ned's and Dickon's middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence. (If this seems confusing, it is.  I recommend keeping a genealogy chart and chronology open while reading about the Wars of the Roses). Warwick marries Anne to Henry VI's son Edward, then loses to Ned after George switches sides again. Despite attempted interventions from George and from Ned's Queen, Katherine Woodville, Richard and Anne marry.

Their marriage is happy (as with her Welsh trilogy, Penman skillfully welds romance and medieval warfare and politics), but times are not. York and Lancaster both district the Queen's relatives, and the Queen herself. Katherine Woodville comes across as a scheming, calculating, power-hungry social climber - totally unsympathetic and completely compelling. I wonder how much of this portrayal, taken from the historical record, is accurate and how much is public scorn for forceful women. Her political machinations come to the forefront towards the end of the book, after Ned has burned himself out with his excesses.  She, her brothers, and her sons by her marriage to Lord Grey scheme to take the regency of her son Edward V from Richard. She'd already pushed Ned to execute unreliable George of Clarence, so what would she do as Edward V's regent, monarch in all but name?

Richard holds onto his regency, then lets his council convince him to take the crown. This leads to two  years of perpetual tragedy for Richard while rumors swirl about the fate of his nephews (Penman gives a plausible, non-Shakespearean fate for them). Broken and perhaps suicidal, Richard's fate on Bosworth Field is almost a given. The Tudors brought peace, and eventually prosperity to England, and in the final chapters Penman hints at how Richard's reputation will be altered for nearly 500 years by politically motivated authors. Penman's first novel sprawls across over 900 pages and I wanted to read it in a single sitting.

Wheel of Fate

I can't believe it's been five years since I last read one of Kate Sedley's Roger the Chapman mysteries.  As I hoped, Wheel of Fate brings Roger out of political intrigue (although the political situation has become very interesting indeed, with the Duke of Gloucester acting as advisor and regent for his young nephew, Edward V) and presents him with a personal mystery.  The novel starts with Roger returning to an empty home and gossipy neighbors hinting as to why his wife and children have left town. He finds his daughter at her grandmother's house, and Margaret Walker tells her former son-in-law that Adela has taken the boys to visit distant relatives in London. Hoping to clear up the misunderstanding that led Adela to leave (and hoping that she will not learn of his actual indiscretion while in service to the Duke), Roger follows with his daughter.

Once in London, Adela easily forgives Roger, and presents him with a mystery.  One of her Godslove cousins recently died mysteriously, and two others have had near misses. She promises them that Roger can solve the mystery, and he does - in a way that makes him look even more intelligent and intuitive than he actually is. With only three more installments in the series, and the Duke of Gloucester's reign as Richard III imminent, I suspect that Roger will be dragged back into the political world. For now, I'm just enjoying his return to civilian life and looking forward to re-reading the series from the beginning.

Death in St. Petersburg

Ballet, murder, and revolution come together in Tasha Alexander's Death in St. Petersburg.  Shortly after Christmas, 1899, Colin Hargraves traveled to St. Petersburg on business, and a few days later Lady Emily and her friend Cecile du Lac followed to welcome in 1900 a second time (Russia still used he Julian calendar at the time). After a performance of Swan Lake, they discover why Nemesteva's understudy (and childhood friend) Katenka performed the final act; the star ballerina's body is lying in a pool of blood near the theater's back entrance.  Did Katenka kill her rival/friend? Or was it her brother, Nemesteva's former lover? Perhaps the killer is one of the revolutionaries Colin is tracking at the behest of Queen Victoria (grandmother of the Czarina). Once again, Alexander uses parallel narratives (here, the second narrative is Katenka's diary) to dole out clues and motivations, creating a well-supported solution that the reader solves at about the same time as Colin and Emily.

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

The Adventuress

Lady Emily's childhood friend Jeremy, Duke of Bambridge, has spent Tasha Alexander's novels making himself the most useless man in England and avoiding marriage.  At the start of The Adventuress, we learn that he's failing at one of his goals.  Jeremy, Emily and Colin, Cecile, and Meg are in Cannes to celebrate Jeremy's engagement to the daughter of an American millionaire.  Amity Wells is a bit unpolished compared to Jeremy and his friends (although not when compared to her social climbing mother - the mother and daughter reminded me of To Marry an English Lord), but her enthusiasm grew not only on me but on Emily.

Emily can't help but encounter dead bodies, and in this case, it's one of Jeremy's Oxford friends.  Even worse, the poisoned whiskey was intended for Jeremy - but who would want to kill the cheerfully useless young Duke?  I thought I figured it out early on, and then changed my mind, only to change it again about 5 pages before Emily discovered the murder's identity.  Normally, that's an ideal mystery - fooled twice, but solved.  However, the murder's motive was a bit off in my mind.  I followed the logic but it just felt wrong.  I'd still enjoyed the book, because I love Lady Emily, and I was thrilled to see Margaret again.

Lionheart

Sharon Kay Penman originally intended to write a trilogy, but she couldn't let go of Richard I.  He was a supporting character in Devil's Brood, completely overshadowed by reckless Henry, scheming Geoffrey, and callow, spoiled John.  Richard was the dashing hero, more valuable but much less interesting.  Penman found something compelling in his character, though, and while Lionheart sprawls across three years and dozens of battles, it doesn't quite live up to her usual standards.  The problem, I think, is Richard.  He's not as compelling as his parents or brothers (or the Welsh heroes of her first trilogy), and the martial focus doesn't leave room for Penman's strength, finding humanity in politically astute schemers.  Richard comes across as more complex than in her prior books, but other than a few scenes with his Saracen opponents, he's working alone.  Lionheart is worth reading, but it didn't transport me the way her best books have.

The Counterfeit Heiress

Warning - Spoiler in the link

A few years ago, every mystery I read seemed to have a subplot (usually one that detracted from the main story and/or involved "old friends" never mentioned before or since).  My current trend is parallel stories, and my authors use it much more successfully.  The Counterfeit Heiress is the third consecutive Lady Emily book to include a separate narrative which adds a new perspective to the main mystery.  It's no surprise that Tasha Alexander does this well; And Only To Deceive used this method to give Lady Emily a reason to solve her husband's death.

Alexander's secondary storyline features Estella Lamar.  One of Cecile's old friends, the mysterious world traveler has only been seen in blurry photographs since abruptly leaving on her travels.  Years later, someone claiming to be Estella shows up at the party of the season, a costume ball at Devonshire house thrown in honor of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.  Cecile recognizes her as an imposter and the woman, wearing a costume very similar to Emily's, runs off.  Someone murders the imposter before anyone can identify her and Emily and her husband Colin make discreet inquiries at the request of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

Cecile, meanwhile, begins to wonder what happened to her friend Estella?  She's been sending dispatches back from her travels, but no one has actually seen her.  Upon analysis, her travels seem impossible, taking too little or too much time to get from point to point.  Estella's Paris and London homes are both fully staffed despite the fact that the mistress of the house hasn't been in residence for over 20 years.  Has she been kidnapped?  Is she even still alive?  Inspired by a true story, Estella's fate caused her imposter's death, but Alexander still manages to make the murderer a mostly sympathetic character.  It's a nice twist on the traditional mystery.

The Deception at Lyme (Or, The Peril of Persuasion)

I'm glad I stuck with Carrie Bebris's Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mysteries.  The first two installments delved too deeply into the supernatural - a genre that usually either annoys me or makes me giggle.  By her fourth book (a Mansfield Park sequel), she'd hit on the formula of fleshing out a few supporting characters from Austen's novel.  Here, the main beneficiary is Mrs. Smith who transforms from a simple gossip to the main source of background information on both the current mystery and the murder in retrospect.

The Deception at Lyme begins, as it should, on the Cobb near where Louisa Musgrove fell.  Darcy's cousin, Lt. Gerald Fitzwilliam, died in battle three years previously and one of his fellow officers, a Lt. St. Clair, is finally in England with the late Lieutenant's small personal trunk so the family (and Georgiana) have travelled to Lyme.  After a walk on the Cobb, they find the unconscious body of a pregnant woman - Mrs. Clay - who goes into labor shortly after they transport her to the Harvilles' nearby house.  She dies while giving birth to a son who becomes the pawn in a bizarre custody battle between her two lovers, Mr. Elliot and Sir Walter Elliot.  The baby's legal if not actual parentage is soon resolved, but how, and why, Mrs. Clay fell (or was pushed) from the seawall remains a mystery.

Also unknown is how, exactly the late Lt. Fitzwilliam died.  Was he killed by a French privateer, or was he murdered by someone smuggling artifacts in kegs of sugar from the West Indies?  Could he have been killed by the late Mr. Smith or Mr. Clay, or by the very much alive Mr. Elliot?  Captain Wentworh and Admiral Croft provide Darcy with valuable information while Elizabeth gets more than just gossip from Mrs. Smith.  The combined information not only resolves both mysteries but also serves to vet both of Georgiana Darcy's suitors.

Two strong mysteries unobtrusively linked and a strong dose of Austen fanfic make The Deception at Lyme the strongest of the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mysteries.  I'm happy to see that instead of ending with Austen's major works, Bebris has continued the series with a Sanditon sequel.  With Lady Susan and The Watsons also available, it may be a few years before Bebris either ends the series or branches out into sequels of sequels.

A Spectacle of Corruption

I should have liked A Spectacle of Corruption much more than I did.  It's well written, protagonist Benjamin Weaver has an interesting backstory, and there's plenty of intrigue and action.  However, like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, it left me cold.  Six months after the events of A Conspiracy of Paper, Benjamin finds himself convicted of murder.  He manages to escape and, acting mostly under an assumed identity, gets involved in the upcoming election while clearing his name.  The problem was, I just didn't care.  I had no doubt that Benjamin would clear his name, but also little interest in how he did it.  The political machinations of the Whigs and Tories appeal to me more in non-fiction than as the electoral backdrop to Weaver's story.  A Spectacle of Corruption is a good book, just not quite for me.

Behind the Shattered Glass

The rich are eccentric where everyone else is merely strange.  Lady Emily's mother, however, has no tolerance for either.  This fact sets up some of the most entertaining scenes in Behind the Shattered Glass, Tasha Alexander's eighth mystery.  Lady Catherine Bromley, wife of an Earl and confidant of Queen Victoria, is *not* amused when her daughter's neighbor staggers across the threshold and dies.  It's just not what one expects when visiting your daughter, her husband Colin, and their infant twins at his family's country seat.  Colin has no choice but to investigate, and (to her mother's chagrin) enlist's Emily's help.

The Hargraveses barely knew the newly elevated Marquess of Montague when he had the gall to die upon their doorstep, but they were mildly acquainted with his cousin Matilda, heir to the title - or so she thinks.  It turns out that there's a missing heir, a young man who's the product of a shunned family line and who has spent his adult life as an explorer and adventurer.  Matilda asks Emily to prove that this *Rodney* person is not the product of a legitimate line, and anyone familiar with the screwball comedies of the 1930s should know that by the end of the book, it won't matter.  More seriously, Emily and Colin also investigate the late Marquess's background, finding him more and more unsavory with every discovery.  Technically a gentleman but no gentleman, he'd misused an Oxford friend and dallied with the vicar's daughter while forming an engagement to an American millionaire's daughter - and that's just what Colin and Emily discover in the first day or so of their investigation.

As she's done with most of her mysteries, Alexander includes a parallel narrative which eventually ties into the main plot.  Lily, an artistically and musically inclined housemaid, tells this part of the story, including backstairs squabbles and potentially important information about the night of the murder.  Lily also catches the attention of Colin's friend Simon, a Duke whose eccentricity includes treating servants like people.

Simon isn't the only person who's chafing at the restrictions of Victorian society.  Emily, as mentioned in A Crimson Warning has joined her mother-in-law in the suffrage movement.  It's a cause Colin can't bring himself to support but he, unlike his wife the Earl's daughter, believes that class distinctions should start falling.  120 years later, they both seem to have giant blind spots but for the time, they're quite progressive.  I liked how Alexander showed that the two can disagree while still gently pushing each other towards their own causes.  I wonder if she's going to take a more political turn in later episodes.  That could be very interesting.

The Coffee Trader

Several years ago at Bouchercon, a panel discussed the placement of mysteries in their own section as opposed to the general fiction section.  That's when I came up with the theory of Popular De-Genrefication.  Once an author reliably reaches the top of the best seller list, his or her genre novels appear on the general fiction shelves.  David Liss's The Coffee Trader exemplifies this in reverse.  It's a literary novel (and a dozen years after its initial publication, probably obscure) but I found it in the mystery section of Borders.  There's some intrigue, but I'd classify it as a straight novel.

Miguel Lienzo, a 17th Century Portugese Converso, relocated to Amsterdam and made (and lost) his living on the futures market.  Due to one of those losses, he's living in his brother's house and being stalked by a former business partner.  His current partner, a Dutch widow named Geertruid convinces him to enter the coffee trade while his brother, at the behest of the local religious authorities, warns him away.  And I didn't care.  I loved Liss's language, but couldn't get involved in the plot or bring my self to care about the characters.  Maybe that's why The Coffee Trader sat unread on my shelf for the decade since I'd read Liss's first novel, A Conspiracy of Paper.  I have two more of his books waiting, but they're unlikely to rise to the top of the To Be Read list.

A Crimson Warning

Lady Emily is back in London, enjoying (or enduring) the round of parties known as The Season and encountering scandal.  Someone has been painting the town red - or rather dumping red paint on the houses of people whose scandals are revealed soon afterwards.  Needless to say, Emily throws herself into solving the mystery.  Along the way, she takes an active role in the suffrage movement, her friend Ivy plays matchmaker for a political operative, and both befriend a scandalous society matron whose carriage is pulled by zebras rather than horses.  It's an average outing for Tasha Alexander's aristocratic sleuth.  I missed Celine and Margaret, but Emily's childhood friend Jeremy elegantly slouches through a few scenes and the story is well plotted, even if the solution is slightly less than satisfying.

The Killer of Pilgrims

Michaelhouse College entered 1358 in financial shambles thank to Wynewyk's creative accounting in A Vein of Deceit.  Attempting to rebalance the books, Master Langerlee took on more students and the food - historically poor - has become scarce as well.  He also accepted the patronage of wealthy and repellent Emma de Colvyll who, in exchange for masses said for her late husband, promised to replace the leaking Michaelhouse roof.  Unfortunately for Matthew Bartholomew, his college's deal meant he was now private physician to the devil - a cranky devil who doesn't want her infected tooth pulled, and whose romance-reading granddaughter has set her sights on the doctor.  Meanwhile, Cambridge was, for once, free of town/gown battles, but only because there was a war of jokes between the colleges and the less-affluent hostels.  Oh, and someone was stealing pilgrims' badges.  Just an ordinary winter in Cambridge.

Well, until someone found John Drax's body behind the tiles intended for the Michaelhouse roof, a death quickly followed by that of Emma de Colvyll's daughter.  Are these deaths connected to the thefts, the war of practical jokes, or both?  Brother Michael, as Senior Proctor, needs to find out before the college/hostel conflict spreads from the University to the town and, as usual, enlists Matthew's help.

As a mystery, The Killer of Pilgrims is OK.  Gregory supported her conclusion and I didn't guess the culprit right away, but the final scene was a bit far fetched and the solution wasn't particular memorable. As entertainment, however, it ranks a little higher.  There's plenty of action, and several well-integrated comic scenes, including one where four physicians (three of them quite drunk) experiment with pitch, oil, and assorted chemicals in an attempt to create a light brighter and steadier than a candle.  Needless to say, it does not go well, but the disaster made me laugh on my commute home.