Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Another of the author's Victorian mysteries (Rutland Place, etc.) featuring poor but mensch-y policeman Thomas Pitt and his highborn wife Charlotte--whose ability to encroach on her husband's turf strains credibility more than ever in this heavily padded, tortoise-paced story involving the three-year-old unsolved murder of young diplomat Robert York. Pitt is ordered by arrogant, ambitious Superintendent Ballarat to reopen the case, for hush-hush reasons possibly having to do with the imminent marriage of York's widow, Veronica, to diplomat Julian Danver, whose father Garrard is also in the foreign service. Meeting a series of dead ends as he goes over old ground, Pitt allows Charlotte to take on the role of country cousin to Jack Radley, her sister Emily's suitor. Jack has social entrÉe to the York and Danver families. In her visits to them, Charlotte senses the enmity and tension between Robert's patrician mother, Loretta, and daughter-in-law Veronica. There are strange undercurrents in the Danver house, too. Meanwhile, Pitt hears stories of a beautiful woman, always dressed in cerise, seen in the dead of night at both houses--but not since the murder. Then the ""accidental"" death of one of his informants prods him to follow a harsh, tedious trail, with dire results. It takes all of Charlotte's nerve and ingenuity to rescue her husband and to uncover what really happened three years before, in a denouement that's bizarre, surprising, and believable--too bad, then, that the passage to it is so repetitive, cluttered, and lengthy. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.