In this mystery, set in London in 1875, Charles Lenox, member of Parliament, is yet again drawn back to detective work: at the start of the book his former protégé, Lord Dallington, asks him to go to a meeting with a potential client in his stead. (Dallington is too ill to go himself, and the client contacted him via an anonymous letter, so he can’t reschedule.) Lenox of course agrees, and of course ends up involved in the whole case, which at first looks only to be blackmail, but soon turns more sinister. The pleasure of this series, for me, lies more in the setting and the characters than in the plot of any given crime: I like Lenox and his circle, and how solid the bonds of love and friendship and loyalty between them are, and I like the descriptions of London and its streets and houses and weather and light. In this book, I was really pleased by this pair of descriptions, the first of a morning and the second of an evening:
It was a crisp, white-skied spring morning, with a firm breeze minutely rearranging the world every few seconds as it gusted, a collar flicked up before it settled again, weak new petals scattered from their branches into the streets. (19)
Jenkins lit his pipe; the smell of fire and tobacco made the room feel closer, a small lamplit vessel afloat in the great unending gray of the day’s weather. (252)
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