Murder at the Serpentine Bridgeby Andrea Penrose
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781496732538
Series: Wrexford & Sloane #6
Publication Date: September 27, 2022
Pages: 361
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Kensington
Charlotte, now the Countess of Wrexford, would like nothing more than a summer of peace and quiet with her new husband and their unconventional family and friends. Still, some social obligations must be honored, especially with the grand Peace Celebrations unfolding throughout London to honor victory over Napoleon.
But when Wrexford and their two young wards, Raven and Hawk, discover a body floating in Hyde Park’s famous lake, that newfound peace looks to be at risk. The late Jeremiah Willis was the engineering genius behind a new design for a top-secret weapon, and the prototype is missing from the Royal Armory’s laboratory. Wrexford is tasked with retrieving it before it falls into the wrong hands. But there are unsettling complications to the case—including a family connection.
Soon, old secrets are tangling with new betrayals, and as Charlotte and Wrexford spin through a web of international intrigue and sumptuous parties, they must race against time to save their loved ones from harm—and keep the weapon from igniting a new war . . .
Is platitudinal a word? My spell checker thinks it is, but when I ask it to define it, I get the definition for latitudinal.
Anyway, this book is platitudinal, as in full of the platitudes. All about love, and family, and friendship, which is all very nice, but not why I read mysteries. Still, this book was better than the last one, which just about put me off the series entirely. This one featured a plot of international intrigue entering around the London Peace Celebrations that took place after the Napoleonic war ended. Penrose was clever; she wrote the story in such a way that I was sure it was transparent and I was going to be annoyed … but while I did figure out one part of the solution, I was totally wrong about the other. There was also some double crossing and double dealing going on that made the whole thing more complicated than it looked. Overall, it was a decent story, but not as compelling as the earliest entries.
At the end the author includes a note that clearly delineates what is historically factual and what she made up (which was actually not as much as I’d have guessed).