Murder in Drury Lane
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
Offering “a vibrant picture of the roles Black and mixed‑race people played in Regency life” (Publishers Weekly), this unique historical mystery series, featuring a mixed-race heroine with a notorious past, will appeal to Bridgerton fans who want a sharper edge to their drama.
Pressed into a union of convenience, Lady Abigail Worthing knew better than to expect love. Her marriage to an absent lord does at least provide some comforts, including a box at the Drury Lane theater, owned by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Abigail has always found respite at the theater, away from the ton’s judgmental stares and 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 June 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. Abigail’s neighbor, Stapleton Henderson, is also in attendance, and the two rush backstage. 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 she cannot resist, especially when the usually curmudgeonly Henderson offers his assistance.
Abigail soon discovers a tangled drama that rivals anything brought to the stage, involving gambling debts, a beautiful actress with a parade of suitors, and the very future of the Drury Lane theatre. For Abigail the case is complicated still 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.
