RogerBW's Blog

2010 historical detection, third in Dean's Dido Kent series. On a visit to a supposedly-haunted ruined abbey, a young lady slips and falls, saying in her delirium only "I saw her – it was her". Was it the Grey Nun of legend?

This book takes full advantage of its Regency background, and puts in the sort of incident that one starts to expect from having read plenty of Georgette Heyer. There are Bad Men a-plenty, a governess with a mysterious background, the natural child of someone with a reputation to lose, and plenty of threat even if there's not much actual peril for Dido (which is only proper; she's a respectable unmarried lady).

I believe that every family which has any claim at all to grandeur should have a ghost. I consider it a kind of necessary which should be attended to as soon as the fortune is made and the country estate purchased.

Dido has only just been employed by Mrs Harman-Foote, who's providing lodging to the injured Penelope, to find out what happened to her, when a pool is drained in the course of landscaping works and turns out to have contained a skeleton: not the Grey Nun, though that's the first assumption, but a lady who vanished some fifteen years past. That's ruled a suicide, and Mrs Harman-Foote applies to Dido again, to disprove that verdict and have the remains moved to hallowed ground.

That is, of course, authorial artifice, to give Dido good reasons to explore both cases. But it's artifice that largely works: Dido has a reputation at this point, and Mrs Harman-Foote could reasonably have heard of her.

The mystery itself piles revelation on revelation, perhaps with slightly too many characters for my modern taste but it's entirely in keeping with the period. I didn't spot the solution, though in retrospect it all seems reasonably well signalled. Perhaps a little less in keeping with the usual expectations of works set in the Regency is the despair at the position of women even in wealthy families, but it's not an anachronistic attitude.

In the ongoing plot, Mr Lomax returns, and he and Dido conduct the experiment of speaking with each other plainly. This is at last an encouraging account of two people falling headlong into love with each other, while neither wants to give up their own habits of thought. It may not reach a definite conclusion here, but there is a distinct sense of progress, as well as of genuine obstacles placed in the couple's path.

Most crucially, Dido has learned some discretion: unlike her last outing, she doesn't blab her half-formed theories to anyone who'll stand still for long enough to hear them, and she's sensible to the suffering that even the truth can cause if she lets it loose carelessly.

Series recommended by Michael Cule, and for me this is definitely the best of them so far. Followed by A Place of Confinement.