The September Society
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3.8 • 22 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed author Charles Finch comes a novel "reminiscent of Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George" (Booklist), in which Charles Lenox revisits his alma mater of Oxford to investiage one student's disappearance and another's murder--tied to a secret group known as The September Society.
In the small hours of the morning one fall day in 1866, a frantic widow visits detective Charles Lenox. Lady Annabelle's problem is simple: her beloved son, George, has vanished from his room at Oxford. When Lenox visits his alma mater to investigate he discovers a series of bizarre clues, including a murdered cat and a card cryptically referring to "The September Society." Then, just as Lenox realizes that the case may be deeper than it appears, a student dies, the victim of foul play.
What could the September Society have to do with it? What specter, returned from the past, is haunting gentle Oxford? Lenox, with the support of his devoted friends in London's upper crust, must race to discover the truth before it comes searching for him, and dangerously close to home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As in Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, a crime committed in India has consequences in England years later in Finch's less than successful second Victorian whodunit to feature amateur detective Charles Lenox (after 2007's A Beautiful Blue Death). Since a prologue set in 1847 India makes clear that a double murder there is connected to a murder in London in 1866, there's little mystery about the general nature of the motive behind the later crime. Lady Annabelle Payson consults the Peter Wimsey like Lenox after the disappearance of her Oxford undergraduate son, George, who left behind in his college room a dead cat and a note referring to the September Society. When George turns up dead as well, Lenox vows to track down the killer, aided by his manservant, the Bunter-like Graham. While neither the prose nor the puzzle are at the level of A Beautiful Blue Death, that volume showed enough promise to suggest that the author is capable of better in the next installment.
