Near the start of this book, Charles Lenox, detective turned politician, gets a letter from his late mother’s cousin (who he knows as Uncle Frederick) asking him to come visit him at his country estate. Charles isn’t planning to go, but then he’s invited to give the opening speech for the upcoming session of Parliament, and starts to think having someplace quiet to work on it might not be a bad idea. At home, Charles keeps getting unwanted visits from other politicians trying to tell him what to talk about (this is often fairly hilarious, as in the below exchange):
His approach was direct. “What these speeches want in them is more of Jesus.”
“D’you think so?” said Lenox.
“I do. Country sports and Jesus—all of our problems could be solved by one of the two, Mr. Lenox.”
“Not the Suez question?”
“Jesus.”
“Education?
“Country sports.”
“What, you want the coal miners’ children to go hunting?” (22)
Making the country even more tempting, though, is the postscript of Frederick’s letter: Plumbley, the village near his estate, has experienced a string of vandalisms, and he wonders if Charles might be able to investigate. Having recently had dinner with John Dallington, his former protégé, Lenox is perhaps thinking more than usual about how much he misses detective work. And so he packs up his wife and infant daughter, and sets off for Somerset with governess, butler, and maid in tow. Once he’s there, Frederick tells him about the vandalisms: first one shop’s windows were broken with a rock; then the same thing happened with another shop. Both rocks had pieces of paper wrapped around them, each with a drawing of a figure hanging from a noose. Nothing was taken from the first shop, but a clock was stolen from the second. Next, the church doors were vandalized, first with the Roman numeral XXII, then with a painting of a black dog. Charles thinks it’s likely just village boys making mischief, but Frederick is sure it isn’t: they’d all been put under a curfew between the second instance of vandalism and the third. The townspeople suspect one Captain Josiah Musgrave, an outsider who married a local girl and who seems to be mistreating her; it doesn’t help that Musgrave has a black dog, but its unclear what the vandalisms mean or what their motivation might be. Before long, though, something worse than vandalism happens: there’s a murder in the village of Plumbley.
Lenox, of course, figures out the murder (though there’s also a twist), and, meanwhile, has a country vacation, complete with horseback riding and a cricket match. I found this book less atmospherically pleasing than the previous one in the series, but still enjoyed it plenty. My one complaint is the way the historical detail is worked in: sometimes it’s great, as with an offhand mention of cattle that suffocated to death from the London fog in 1873 (it’s true, according to London Fogs), but sometimes it just feels clunky to me, in passages like this:
The quality of the average constable in the bucolic parts of England varied greatly. London itself had only had an official police presence for the last forty-odd years, since Sir Robert Peel had established the Metropolitan Police Force at Scotland Yard. (The members of the new troop had been called “bobbies” in honor of the founder’s forename.) It was only in the last ten years that, by law, every town in Great Britain had perforce to hire and pay someone specifically to impose the law. (69)
Despite that, though, I’ve already requested the next book in this series from the library: I guess I’m not that bothered.
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