2019 historical mystery; seventh in Huber's Lady Darby series
(post-Regency amateur detection). Gage and Lady Darby investigate the
murder of a rake which was set up to look like an attempt by
resurrection men to obtain a body for dissection—and with London
already seething after the failure of the Reform Bill, Lady Darby's
past is raked up again.
Huber mentions in an afterword that these events were in her mind
when she established the premise for the series (that Lady Darby's
first marriage was to an eminent surgeon who forced her to draw his
dissections for his proposed anatomical textbook, prefiguring Gray by
a few decades). And the historical research is solid here, as the
events of the story interlace with those of the "Italian Boy"
murder
of 1831. It's a fine piece of work, keeping up narrative tension for
the fictional case even as the historical one rumbles on in the
background.
If our principals' attitudes are rather more modern than one might
expect to find in gentry and nobility of the period, well, that's
something of a necessary conceit of the setup, and we are at least
reminded that these attitudes are not generally held, even by allies
never mind by villains. (And one particular villain, also the first
victim, is painted so very black that I expected something specific to
come of it more than a motive for his death., but it never did.)
There are the usual errors, though: a Protestant couple, which our
principals are, would not speak of "going to chapel", because they
have an actual church to go to (as, with grudging acceptance, do
Catholics), unlike those nonconformists who are not as fortunate. "The
proscribed mourning period for her rotten blackguard of a husband",
no, it's prescribed, these are different words that mean different
things. The newly formed Metropolitan Police will not be known as the
"Metro Police"… ever to the present day, I think. A conservatory
converted into an artist's studio would not be praised for facing
"the sunny south"; quite the opposite, because direct sunlight makes
the whole business of painting (or other artistic work) harder. None
of these breaks the story, but how I wish Huber or her publisher had
taken the time to have the draft read through by someone familiar with
the subject matter of the book as well as the language, because each
time I trip over one of them I am thrown out of my enjoyment of the
story and have to work to get back in..
But I did get back in, and it was worth it. Many series with extended
unresolved romantic tension lose their interest when that tension is
resolved, but this volume may be a high point of the series to date.
Gate and Lady Darby are neither constantly at odds nor entirely in
harmony (though they're closer to the latter), and their points of
difference are reasonable ones that accentuate how well they deal in
other respects. The motive of the villain may not be all I might wish,
but it's consistent with what's previously been established, even if
deciding that this is the person to blame rests rather more on "well
it must be them" than on any individual piece of evidence.
Not perhaps a book for the classic mystery fan, but I found I enjoyed
it greatly in spite of some unfortunate missteps.