British author Linscott's solid historical series (Dead Man Riding
, etc.) seldom portrays English suffragette Nell Bray breaking the law, even when the law is wrong, but at the start of this nifty tale of love, deceit and socialism, Nell finds herself explaining to a constable that she entered wealthy widower Oliver Venn's country house in the middle of the night "to steal a picture." She just so happened to stumble on a corpse while doing so. The late Philomena Venn bequeathed to the Women's Social and Political Union a valuable French painting, a less famous version of Boucher's La Blonde Odalisque
at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. She also left a bereaved husband, a niece who makes and sells handcrafted furniture and a nephew who collects and preserves folk music, in addition to a legacy of socialist activism involving a Fabian splinter group, the Scipians. When Bray's initial foray to claim the Odalisque musters only a forgery, she must return to sort things out and ends up trying to aid a man engaged to two women simultaneously. The author's adept characterizations and understated use of the mores, customs, fads and manners of early 20th-century Britain make for an engrossing combination. Add to that a murder that appears both cruel and senseless, a suitably suspenseful chase and a highly satisfactory denouement, and one has another first-rate entertainment. (May 12)
FYI:
Linscott's eighth Nell Bray novel
, Absent Friends, won the 2000 CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger.
