When Wrexford and Kit stumble across a dead body on their way home from an evening of cards and dice, Wrexford is determined to stay out of the matter and let the proper authorities handle it. However, the widow of the man comes calling the next day, asking him to investigate the matter as her husband Elihu Ashton, an inventor, thought highly of Wrexford’s scientific work, and she believes he was murdered in order to steal his latest invention. Charlotte gets pulled in both due to Wrexford’s request for help and the fact that one of her close friends is an investor in Ashton’s business. As the two of them dig deeper into the mystery, they find twists and turns that make finding the murderer difficult, even as the body count increases.
One of the things I’m really liking about this series is how it really highlights the changes that were going on during this time period. Often when I read things set in the Regency period the main focus is the social whirl of the upper classes, but there was a lot of innovation going on with science and technology and a backlash to that as well. Penrose does a good job of weaving that into the plot. I also appreciated the complexity of the mystery. There were several easy, predicable avenues she could have taken with who the murderer was which she did not follow, even if some of the characters fall into that pattern of thinking.
But it’s really the characters that make this series work so well for me. Wrexford and Charlotte are both fascinating individuals and fun to watch work with one another, but even the secondary and tertiary characters are sketched well enough that I have a clear image of them and their personalities in my mind when I’m reading. All of them have at least a little complexity to them which makes for interesting dynamics and surprising turns. We get to meet a few new characters in this book that I hope will be sticking around in later books. It was an engrossing read that lives up to the standards set in the first book of the series. Five out of five stars.
