Thomas Chaloner enters his fourth adventure in Restoration London with his investigation into two strange deaths. It is Christmas 1663 and Londoners are celebrating a rather different festival from that of the Commonwealth. The century of England’s Civil Wars provides many opportunities to look at clashing ideologies and this early Restoration period is one full of difficulties for anyone who had taken part in Cromwell’s work. Chaloner feels himself to be a stranger in his own country since his work, as a spy for the previous regime, had sent him abroad with great frequency. The licentiousness of the King’s Court is very obvious as the Lord of Misrule plays tasteless jokes and lavish balls involve revealing costumes, excessive drinking and sexual encounters. All the period detail of life in the 1660s, whether at White Hall or in other areas of London, is excellent.
The victims of poison are government officials - clerks who seem not to share the gaiety of White Hall and are known for their integrity. Chaloner’s work is complicated by the need to investigate the theft of a Bernini bust belonging to the King; the conviction of his employer, the Lord Chancellor, that another clerk, Greene, is the killer and the willingness of the Chancellor to employ the unctuous Colonel Turner as another spy in competition with Chaloner (an additional threat is that he will replace Chaloner by Turner). Chaloner succeeds in questioning many with connections to the victims or possibly relevant knowledge but only finds the case becoming more and more fraught with complications. He finds himself frequently in danger but wins through to a solution eventually.
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Jennifer S. Palmer
This is the fourth book in the series about Thomas Chaloner which began with A Conspiracy of Violence. Susanna Gregory also writes a series about Matthew Bartholomew in medieval Cambridge - the fifteenth title in that series is just being published