In a riveting new novel in a Victorian-set mystery series brimming with authentic atmosphere, Doctor Julia Lewis, Scotland Yard’s first female medical examiner, and her partner, Detective Inspector Richard Tennant, investigate a string of murders in the art world.
London, 1867: Among the genteel young ladies of London society, painting is a perfectly acceptable pastime—but a woman who dares to pursue art as a profession is another prospect, indeed. Dr. Julia Lewis, familiar with the disrespect afforded women in untraditional careers, is hardly surprised when Scotland Yard shows little interest in complaints made by her friend, Mary Allingham, about a break-in at her art studio. Mary is just one of many “lady painters” being targeted by vandals.
Painters’ sitters are vanishing, too—women viewed by some as dispensable outcasts. Inspector Richard Tennant, however, takes the attacks seriously, suspecting they’re linked to the poison-pen letters received by additional members of the Allingham family. For Julia, the issue is complicated by Tennant’s previous relationship with Mary’s sister-in-law, Louisa, and by her own surprising reaction to that entanglement.
But when someone close to them commits suicide and a young woman turns up dead, the case can no longer be so easily ignored by ‘respectable’ society. Layer after layer, Julia and Tennant scrape away the facts of the case like paint from a canvas. What emerges is a somber picture of vice, depravity, and deception stretching from London’s East End to the Far East—with a killer at its center, determined to get away with one last, grisly murder . . .
About the author
Patrice Mc Donough taught history for over thirty years. She was lucky to grow up in a reading household—her mother and father always had current books by their reading chairs, and others lined up. They were a history‑loving family, too, which kindled her later professional direction. She read her way through her older brother’s hand‑me‑down copies of the Hardy Boys and all of Agatha Christie, so, as a mystery‑loving history teacher, it was natural that she would turn to the historical mystery genre. Visit her online at patricemcdonough1789.com.
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