When Falcons Fall
A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Sebastian St. Cyr is drawn into a murder investigation in a deceptively peaceful English village in this gripping historical mystery from the national bestselling author of Why Kill the Innocent.
Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, and his wife, Hero, have come to this deceptively peaceful Shropshire village to honor a slain friend. But when the body of a young widow is found on the banks of the river Teme, the village’s inexperienced new magistrate turns to Sebastian for help. Sebastian soon realizes that Emma Chance was hiding her true identity, and she was not the first beautiful young woman in the village to be murdered. Also troubling are the machinations of Lucien Bonaparte, the estranged brother of the megalomaniac French Emperor Napoléon. Held captive under the British government’s watchful eye, Bonaparte is restless, ambitious, and treacherous.
Home to the eerie ruins of an ancient monastery, Ayleswick reveals itself to be a dark and dangerous place with a violent past that may be connected to Sebastian’s own unsettling origins. And as he faces his most diabolical opponent ever, he is forced to consider what malevolence he’s willing to embrace in order to destroy a killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harris's strong 11th Regency whodunit (after 2015's Who Buries the Dead) takes nobleman Sebastian St. Cyr to Shropshire in 1813. Two years earlier, Sebastian learned that he was a bastard. Recently, he met Jamie Knox, who may have been his half-brother, but Jamie was shot dead in London by someone who was aiming for Sebastian, and Sebastian has now taken it on himself to deliver a present to Jamie's grandmother in the village of Ayleswick-sur-Teme. There he's recruited by the callow local squire, Archie Rawlins, after a woman's body is discovered in a meadow. The presence of an empty bottle of laudanum near the corpse leads the constable to consider the death self-inflicted, but Archie has his doubts, which Sebastian is able to validate. The victim is identified as Emma Chance, a widow who just arrived in the village. The presence in the area of Napoleon Bonaparte's renegade brother Lucien enhances the intricate murder puzzle.
