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tcfjr 's review for:
A Beautiful Blue Death
by Charles Finch
I started reading A Beautiful Blue Death, a Victorian upper-class detective novel by Charles Finch, on Thursday, and finished it today.
This has a lot of parallels with the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery series, which is set in the same era. With the Pitts, Thomas is a working class policeman and his wife Charlotte is the daughter of a lord. Charlotte's background lets her move in the higher levels of society, while Thomas can work the docks and back alleys.
With this book, Lord Charles Lenox is an amateur detective with some past successes. Here, his life-long friend Lady Jane Grey asks him to look into the mysterious death of her former maid, who is now working elsewhere to be near her betrothed. Lenox uses his butler to handle the lower-class inquiries, while he works the upper crust.
The story itself has some interesting twists, but it suffers from the author's heavy-handedness in developing his large set of characters. The case in hand is not fully resolved, and we're left at the end with an overly coy setup - will Lenox try to change his friendship with Lady Jane into something more?
This is the first in a new series, and many authors (and their editors) work out the kinks in the follow-up books, once all the introductions and setting details are out of the way. I was a little disappointed in this story, but will certainly read the next one to see how things progress.
http://goption.com/2011/07/a-beautiful-blue-death/
This has a lot of parallels with the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery series, which is set in the same era. With the Pitts, Thomas is a working class policeman and his wife Charlotte is the daughter of a lord. Charlotte's background lets her move in the higher levels of society, while Thomas can work the docks and back alleys.
With this book, Lord Charles Lenox is an amateur detective with some past successes. Here, his life-long friend Lady Jane Grey asks him to look into the mysterious death of her former maid, who is now working elsewhere to be near her betrothed. Lenox uses his butler to handle the lower-class inquiries, while he works the upper crust.
The story itself has some interesting twists, but it suffers from the author's heavy-handedness in developing his large set of characters. The case in hand is not fully resolved, and we're left at the end with an overly coy setup - will Lenox try to change his friendship with Lady Jane into something more?
This is the first in a new series, and many authors (and their editors) work out the kinks in the follow-up books, once all the introductions and setting details are out of the way. I was a little disappointed in this story, but will certainly read the next one to see how things progress.
http://goption.com/2011/07/a-beautiful-blue-death/