As Death Draws Near
A Lady Darby Mystery
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £7.49
-
- £7.49
Publisher Description
In this historical mystery from the national bestselling author of A Brush with Shadows, Lady Kiera Darby and Sebastian Gage get tangled in a dangerous web of religious and political intrigue.
July 1831. In the midst of their idyllic honeymoon in England’s Lake District, Kiera and Gage’s seclusion is soon interrupted by a missive from her new father-in-law. A deadly incident involving a distant relative of the Duke of Wellington has taken place at an abbey south of Dublin, Ireland, and he insists that Kiera and Gage look into the matter.
Intent on discovering what kind of monster could murder a woman of the cloth, the couple travel to Rathfarnham Abbey school. Soon a second nun is slain in broad daylight near a classroom full of young girls. With the sinful killer growing bolder, the mother superior would like to send the students home, but the growing civil unrest in Ireland would make the journey treacherous.
Before long, Kiera starts to suspect that some of the girls may be hiding a sinister secret. With the killer poised to strike yet again, Kiera and Gage must make haste and unmask the fiend, before their matrimonial bliss comes to an untimely end...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rich political background more than compensates for the slow-moving plot of Huber's fifth full-length Lady Darby mystery (after 2015's A Study in Death). In the last installment, the novella A Pressing Engagement, the Scottish noblewoman found love with English detective Sebastian Gage and married him despite their differences in rank. Now, in July 1831, their idyllic honeymoon is cut short when Gage's father asks him to look into a postulant's murder in a Catholic nunnery in Ireland. The investigation tests the couple's mettle as a detective team, especially when a nun is killed soon after they arrive. The real focus of the story is on the political tensions between the English and the Irish, the colonizers and the colonized, which are expressed as religious tensions between the English Anglicans and the Irish Catholics in the form of the tithe rebellions. Huber conveys these intricacies with a light touch through the prism of Lady Darby's developing political awareness. Fans of historical mysteries will be rewarded.
