The Death of Me: A Heloise Chancey Mystery

Set in 1864, Tjia’s solid third Heloise Chancey mystery (after 2019’s A Necessary Murder) finds the English courtesan and sometime private detective in Paris, where she’s surprised to receive a summons from Sir Simon Somerscale, an affluent countryman, to the debtor’s prison where he’s confined for failing to pay £500 in a breach of promise suit involving a French waitress with whom he had a one-night stand. Somerscale tells Heloise that “certain people at Westminster” have intercepted a letter regarding a planned crime on English soil; he was to pose as the letter’s intended recipient and attend a meeting with the unknown sender that night at a Paris locale specified in the letter. He persuades Heloise to go in his stead. A special code in the letter will allow her to recognize the sender. She soon learns that the plot includes a terrorist bombing campaign, and she must act fast to identify the culprits before they can strike. Tjia keeps the pace brisk and makes her redoubtable lead plausible. Fans of Carole Nelson Douglas’s Irene Adler series will be pleased. (Mar.)