I have really enjoyed the last few novels in this series after having a few that didn’t quite work as well for me: it’s nice that we haven’t had too many French espionage connections lately and are just doing murder mysteries. Also, I appreciate that Sebastian St. Cyr hasn’t been too beaten up lately after seeming to get stabbed or shot (at) quite a bit.
Sebastian St. Cyr and his sister have a complicated relationship; her husband was a scoundrel and her son definitely isn’t much of an improvement. When Bayard wakes up from a drunken stupor and discovers his friend dead, burned to a crisp in a bonfire, he immediately visits his uncle, famous amongst the ton for his eccentric interest in crime solving. This is the second of his friends to have died under odd circumstances in the last few weeks, and Bayard fears he may be next.
As Sebastian starts his investigation, he sees there are quite a few paths this could take – is there some connection to the recent interest in Druidic practices and were these ritual deaths? Why do so many people that are working to reform the country keep coming up? Why were his nephew and his friends running into them? What caused the falling out that made their friend group fracture from 6 to 5?
As the novel progresses, Sebastian discovers more and more about his nephew’s activities and the issue is more that there might be too many good people with reason to seek vengeance against his nephew. I was certainly more on the side of the suspects the more the novel went along. As always, the novel also uses Hero’s journal articles to explore economic issues of the time, this time interviewing a series of former small business owners whose incomes dried up as the war ended and everyone had less disposable income, driving them from modest but stable homes to squalor. It really all feels just a little too relevant to today and our ever weakening social programs and safety nets, all in the interest of corporate welfare and keeping the elite happy.
