MURDER IN BLACKFRIARS

The year 1884 brings the promise, and threat, of serious changes to the life of Mayfair cook Katharine Holloway.

The first change is good news for Kat’s friend Joanna Millburn: A Basingstoke solicitor has offered Joanna’s husband, Sam, a much better job—but one that will require his family to move 50 miles from London along with Grace, Kat’s beloved 14-year-old daughter, whom they’ve taken in. The second, the opportunity ex-maid Hannah Dunnett presses on Kat to open a bakery stall on Portobello Road, also comes with downsides: Mrs. Bywater, the mistress of the Mount Street house where Kat works, would surely toss her out if she knew about her side hustle, and a well-entrenched competitor on Portobello Road loses no time in threatening her with exposure. The third is the most urgent. Kat’s fiancé, former Special Branch undercover operator Daniel McAdam, learns from rough-hewn Zachariah Grimes, who’s already saved the lives of Daniel and Kat, that he’s been approached by builder Howard Banks, who claims to know something about Daniel’s parentage. Since Daniel’s a foundling who doesn’t even know his birth name, this is exciting news indeed. But when Daniel and Kat accompany Grimes to his meeting with Howard, they find the informant stabbed to death and surrounded by police eager to take Daniel into custody. The clues to his death eventually lead the sleuths to a grand smuggling scheme and an utterly unsurprising villain. So in the end, one of those other changes turns out to be more consequential than the actual murder.

The mixture as before, best suited to readers already invested in the franchise heroine or in Victorian London.