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Summary
Summary
Charles Lenox is at the pinnacle of his political career and is a delighted new father. His days of investigating the crimes of Victorian London are now years behind him.He plans a trip to his uncle's estate, Somerset, in the expectation of a few calm weeks to write an important speech. When he arrives in the quiet village of Plumley, however, what greets him is a series of strange vandalisms upon the local shops: broken windows, minor thefts, threatening scrawls.Only when a far more serious crime is committed does he begin to understand the great stakes of those events, and the complex and sinister mind that is wreaking fear and suspicion in Plumley. Now, with his protégé, John Dallington, at his side, the race is on for Lenox to find the culprit before he strikes again. And this time his victim may be someone that Lenox loves.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1874, Finch's superb sixth mystery (after 2011's A Burial at Sea) finds former private investigator Charles Lenox now an influential member of Parliament. Lenox accepts the honor of giving the opening speech for the new parliamentary session, which could be the prologue to further government advancement. To prepare, he accepts his uncle's invitation to visit the uncle's estate in the village of Plumbley, which has been afflicted by bizarre acts of vandalism: someone drew a picture of a man hanging from a noose on the doors of two local merchants, and the Roman numeral for 22 was painted on the church door. The stabbing murder of a 19-year-old young man raises the ante. Lenox welcomes the chance to resume detecting, "his truest vocation." Boasting one of Finch's tightest and trickiest plots, this installment further establishes Lenox as a worthy heir to the aristocratic mantle of Lord Peter Wimsey. Agents: Kari Stuart and Jennifer Joel, ICM. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A member of Parliament prefers investigating over speechifying. Even though he's still called upon for advice by his protg John Dallington, Charles Lenox has long since given up his practice as an investigator. A newborn daughter and a request from his party to give the opening speech at a Parliamentary session carry him even further away from his former career. So would an invitation from his uncle Frederick Ponsonby to bring his family for a visit to his lovely estate in Plumbley, Somerset--if it weren't sharpened by a hint of mysterious vandalism. Deciding that it just may be the perfect place for the peace and quiet he needs to write his speech, Charles repairs with his wife, Jane, their infant, Sophie, and her nursemaid, the formidable Miss Taylor, to Plumbley, where Charles looks more closely into several cases of apparently senseless property damage. The case takes on a more serious turn when a young police constable is found stabbed to death. The locals are suspicious of Capt. Musgrave, a retired naval officer who married a local girl and moved to the village. His wife is rarely seen, and most of his neighbors are convinced that he's mistreating her. Charles has the help of Dallington, who's staying with them in disgrace after a drunken spree. Then, Freddie is kidnapped, and Charles must do everything possible to solve the crime and rescue his beloved uncle. The sixth in Finch's steadily improving series (A Burial at Sea, 2011, etc.) develops the congenial continuing characters further while providing quite a decent mystery.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Charles Lenox, the Victorian-era member of Parliament, doesn't think he misses his days as London's premier private investigator. He's too busy climbing the political ladder, and, anyway, his young protege, John Dallington, seems to be doing just fine on his own, turning into a first-class detective. But when Lenox accepts an invitation to spend some time at his uncle's estate in the country, he has to admit it's not entirely because he needs peace and quiet to work on an upcoming speech: his uncle's tantalizing hints about a series of bewildering vandalisms in the village of Plumley tug at Charles' not-so-dormant investigative curiosity (and when vandalism escalates to murder, Lenox is hooked). The latest in Finch's veddy British mysteries is, like its predecessors, leisurely paced, with ornate Victorian dialogue that often comes oh-so-close to parody ( I find a walk after supper a eupeptic diversion ) and plenty of richly detailed scene-setting description. Sure to please fans of the previous Lenox novels.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The story opens with a harrowing flashback to the riots of 1992, when South Central went up in flames. Bosch and his partner were sent into this war zone to work an "ordinary" homicide, the execution-style killing of a white woman quickly tagged "Snow White." Like scores of other crimes committed during those chaotic days, the murder of Anneke Jespersen, a Danish photojournalist and international war correspondent, was never solved. With the 20th anniversary of the riots coming up, the top brass try to stop Bosch from revisiting his old turf, anticipating a public-relations nightmare should the murder of a white woman turn out to be the only open case the police manage to close. Bosch won't budge, of course, because that's just the way Bosch is. Connelly has always been scrupulous about following proper procedure, which means that his aging detective must scramble to keep current in the forensic sciences. It's fun to watch an old war horse like Bosch navigating the new technology (or, more often than not, getting younger officers to do it for him). But Bosch is working a 20-year-old case using 20-year-old methods that involve analog human skills, like interrogating hostile witnesses, making blind phone calls and "walking a gun" - cop jargon for methodically linking a single gun to multiple murders. The title of the novel refers to what is probably the most primitive (and symbolically potent) example of such police work: the street cop's handwritten notes, taken in the field and jotted down on index cards to be stored in little black boxes. Handed one of these objects by an old-school cop, Bosch regards it with respectful awe, amazed it escaped the purge that imperfectly transferred all hard files to digital archives. However dated, some artifacts simply must be saved. The upper-class amateur sleuth, an endangered species even in historical mysteries, is very much alive in Charles Finch's charming Victorian whodunits. In A DEATH IN THE SMALL HOURS (Minotaur, $24.99), Charles Lenox packs up his wife and child and flees the hurly-burly of London for his uncle's country estate, where he can gather his thoughts for the keynote speech he's to deliver at a coming session of Parliament. To ward off the torpor of country life, Lenox sets out to investigate certain acts of vandalism that have alarmed Uncle Freddie, who comes from a long line of "gentle gentlemen" and feels responsible for the well-being of the village. Coming from the same ancestral line, Lenox shows a similar gentility when he exposes the vices and misdeeds of the villagers without doing damage to the basic soundness of the community. But while he isn't a social snob like the golden-age sleuths on whom he's modeled, Lenox is fast becoming a paragon of virtue that makes him seem too good to be true. Not only does this member of Parliament argue for stricter child-labor laws, expanded literacy, voting rights and the abolishment of capital punishment, but in defiance of Victorian convention he keeps sneaking into the nursery to cuddle his darling baby daughter. Timothy Hallinan's affable antihero, an accomplished thief but inept sleuth named Junior Bender, makes a terrific first impression in CRASHED (Sono Crime, $25), swinging from a chandelier to escape the jaws of four vicious guard dogs. The burglary that went so horribly wrong was the nasty work of Trey Annunziato, a Los Angeles mob boss who set Bender up in order to blackmail him into working for her. His ostensible assignment is to stop a saboteur from wrecking the multimillion-dollar porn movie Trey is bankrolling. But as he discovers and to his dismay, the real job is to chaperon the star, a beloved child actor who grew up to be a sad and wasted addict, her addled mind currently dwelling on "Planet Zero, where the sky is black and the rivers are full of dead animals." Bender's quick wit and smart mouth make him a boon companion on this oddball adventure. Whether he's earnestly analyzing the meaning of the "dead wet girl ghosts" in Japanese horror movies or simply knocking out a quick bon mot, he talks a great game. After writing several historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, Maureen Jennings has shifted her attention to England during the blitz. BEWARE THIS BOY (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), the second book in this series, sends Inspector Tom Tyler to Birmingham to investigate a fatal explosion in a munitions factory. The plot loses its footing in a political swamp, but the period setting is amazingly vivid and terribly real. Writing with all senses on high alert, Jennings creates a flawless approximation of a typical day in the life of all the girls who worked on weapons assembly lines, their skin yellow and their hair orange from the cordite. And when she takes the story underground during an air raid, those bombs she starts dropping come so close that readers might want to duck their heads and take cover. Michael Connellys hero, a veteran cop, makes sneaky end-runs around the Los Angeles Police Department.
Library Journal Review
Away from London this time, Victorian sleuth Charles Lenox finds a strange evil surging through the normally placid village of Plumley. Protege John Dallington helps out in the series's sixth title (after A Burial at Sea). (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.