The Death of Colonel Mann
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Behind the curtained windows of Victorian Boston is a world of passion, scandal ... and murder.
In life, he was the most despised man in Boston, publisher of the town's scurrilous gossip sheet -- and buyer and seller of people's most scandalous indiscretions. Now Colonel William d'Arcy Mann lies on the floor of his fashionable hotel suite, the victim of a single gunshot wound to the heart.
Addington Ames came to recover a packet of love letters written by his young cousin, Val, that had fallen into the blackmailing colonel's possession. But when he discovers Mann's corpse instead, Ames suddenly finds himself at the center of a murder inquiry, his name splashed across the town newspapers.
With Val facing public disgrace -- on the eve of marriage to an impeccable member of Brahmin society -- Ames's only hope is to find the damning missives, which he believes vanished with the killer. With the help of his sister, Caroline, and their boarder, Dr. John MacKenzie, he moves through Boston's most prominent social circles in search of a well-concealed murderer whose final act of violence will leave no life -- highborn or low -- untouched...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peale (the pseudonym of mainstream novelist Nancy Zaroulis) brings to life Gilded Age Boston in her first foray into the burgeoning field of historical mysteries. When, in 1891, Brahmin Addington Ames finds blackmailer Colonel William D'Arcy Mann shot to death in his hotel room, many Boston socialites are relieved, since Mann printed their misdeeds in his scandalous newspaper if they failed to pay up. Ames is bent on recovering a packet of indiscreet letters written by his young cousin Val, else her plans to marry a rich and eligible scion of one of Boston's most eminent families would be thwarted. Addington; his feisty sister, Caroline; and their Watson-like lodger, Dr. MacKenzie, must work fast to find the letters, as well as to solve the crime. Peale is particularly good at portraying the circumscribed lives of affluent Boston women of the Victorian age, and integrates this very lack of freedom nicely into the plot's development. Characters act and think like people of their class and period, even if they tend to the dull side. Indeed, the author's depiction of the manners and social codes of proper 19th-century Bostonians redeems what is otherwise a pedestrian mystery. Despite a strong setting, the story is less than riveting.
