Murder in Bloomsbury: An Atlas Catesby Mystery

In Quincy’s solid second Atlas Catesby mystery (after 2017’s Murder in Mayfair), world traveler Catesby and the widowed Lady Roslyn Lilliana Warwick investigate the sudden death of her maid’s brother in Regency-era London. The coroner has ruled that Gordon Davis, a footman turned factory clerk, accidentally overdosed on the arsenic he took for medical reasons, but the form of arsenic in his body doesn’t match the type he habitually used. Davis was a seductive schemer determined to marry into wealth. Those who wished him dead include the father of a youth he lured into gambling debt, the aristocrats whose daughters he compromised, and the conventional young woman whose scandalously explicit letters he threatened to reveal. As Catesby untangles the victim’s many intrigues, his passion for Lilliana reawakens, but the social chasm between a baron’s fourth son and the sister of one of England’s most powerful dukes still deters him from asking for her hand. Quincy evokes both the contradictions of her setting and the romantic tensions between her protagonists, though anachronistic attitudes and language throughout can jar. Readers will look forward to Catesby and Lilliana’s further adventures. [em]Agent: Kevan Lyon, Marsal Lyon Literary Agency. (Feb.) [/em]