Murder in Drury Lane
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Bringing a vibrant edge and welcome diversity to the Regency genre, this exciting historical mystery from award-winning author Vanessa Riley features an engaging heroine with an independent streak, a notorious past, and a decided talent for sleuthing . . .
Pressed into a union of convenience, Lady Abigail Worthing’s marriage to an absent lord does at least provide some comforts, including a box at the Drury Lane Theatre, owned by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Abigail has always found respite there, away from the ton’s judgmental stares, the risks of her own secret work to help the cause of abolition—and her fears that someone from her past wants her permanently silenced. But on one particular evening everything collides, and the performance takes an unwelcome turn . . .
Onstage, a woman emits a scream of genuine terror. A man has been found dead in the prop room, stabbed through the heart. The magistrate, keen to avoid bringing more attention to the case and making Lady Worthing more of a target, asks Abigail not to investigate. But of course, she cannot resist . . .
Abigail soon discovers a tangled drama that rivals anything brought to the stage, involving gambling debts, an actress with a parade of suitors, and the very future of the Drury Lane Theatre. For Abigail the case is complicated further, for one suspect is a leading advocate for the cause dearest to her heart—the abolition of slavery within the British Empire. Uncovering the truth always comes at a price. But this time, it may be far higher than she wishes to pay.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bodies abound in Riley's disappointing second Lady Worthington Mystery (after 2022's Murder at Westminster), in which the eponymous heroine gets caught between her political principles and her desire to catch a killer. In 1806 London, Lady Abigail Worthington—daughter of a white Scottish father and a Black Jamaican mother, and wife to an absentee sea captain—spends a comforting evening at her beloved Drury Lane theater after her London townhouse is ransacked by an unknown intruder. The evening is cut short when aspiring playwright Anthony Danielson is discovered backstage skewered with a prop spear, the pages of his half-finished play strewn on the floor around his body. With the help of her neighbor, physician Stapleton Henderson, Abigail sets out to solve the murder before the scandal forces the theater to close. A moral dilemma arises when she begins to suspect the killer could be a leading figure in the fight to pass an antislavery bill through Parliament, a cause Abigail vehemently supports. It's a promising theme, and Riley sets her sights on a pivotal, fascinating period in British history, but the proceedings suffer from slapdash execution. With a convoluted, meandering plot, and heaps of anachronistic language, this misses the mark.
