The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft

Wright skillfully evokes the people and ideas from the age of Enlightenment in her entertaining second mystery featuring Mary Wollstonecraft (after 2010's Midnight Fires), which once again shows how Mary's brilliance as a freethinker could have made her an expert crime-solver. In 1792, Mary is completing the second part of her renowned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when her friend, painter Henry Fuseli, finds his famous painting The Nightmare stolen. Henry suspects a critic of his work and has the young man imprisoned. But when an acquaintance is murdered and her corpse left in a tableau suggestive of the artwork, Mary finds herself investigating an intrigue steeped in politics of the day characteristic of a conservative England and a revolutionary France. Several illegitimate children of uncertain paternity provide red herrings, and walk-ons by Fuseli, poet William Blake, and chemist Joseph Priestley help ground events in credible historical reality. (Sept.)