This is the 20th novel in the series about a crime solving nobleman in Regency England, and the series continues to go strong. This one is more of a straight up murder mystery – some of the middle novels in the series got a bit wrapped up in French espionage story lines. I would even say this one would actually even be approachable to someone that hadn’t read any other novels in the series – of course, you’d be missing some of the complexity of the character relationships but where relevant, Harris shares the details. There was at least one character that was definitely a call back to a previous novel that I barely (didn’t) remember, and it wasn’t an issue. It would basically be like turning on any random episode of Law and Order: SVU. You know there is more going on between the detectives and lawyers but it doesn’t really interfere with your ability to follow the main mystery.
Sebastian St. Cyr is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars so the novels often tend to refer back to his service, and London is still rather filled with people with connections to France that have found themselves in England. While I have read quite a few romances set in regency England, Harris goes into details about the political environment of England and France that those novels often don’t address, especially when it comes to French politics and how England is playing a role in those and vice versa. Even when they don’t directly end up playing a part in the final resolution, they add interesting detail and color to the narrative.
Similarly, Harris uses St. Cyr’s wife, Hero, to highlight various social issues of the time and how the poor lived. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the nobility in fiction about this time, and the main character is noble, but I appreciate the effort to also give voice to the struggles of real people in these, whether it is chimney sweeps (a previous novel) or discharged military veterans released without pensions to a country without jobs for them. Hero uses her position to write a series of articles where she explores these issues and as a result educate 19th century newspaper readers and 21st century novel readers.
The novel begins when a teenage boy comes to St Cyr and leads him to a dead body staged to look like the tarot card, The Hanged Man. The dead man, Lord Preston Farnsworth, is the younger brother of a duke and known by society as a crusader for social causes. One of Sebastian’s friends has a long well-known conflict with the man, but his investigations soon show that Preston was not the moral man his public persona implied. He was very much one of those guys that supported causes that seemed to help the poor that were more focused on punishing them. And yet, while many have motives to kill Preston, none of those quite fit with how he died or was found.
I do wish we had had a bit more time with Hero and some of the other characters established in earlier novels but it was also nice to have a relatively tight and focused mystery, and there’s always the next novel for more with the supporting cast.