PORTRAIT OF PERIL

Why go on a honeymoon when there’s a murderer to catch?

October 1890. The wedding of London crime-scene photographer Sarah Bain and DS Thomas Barrett is interrupted by the discovery of a body in the crypt of St. Peter’s Church. The victim, Charles Firth, has been stabbed in the chest. Sarah’s granted a leave of absence by Sir Gerald Mariner, her boss at the Daily World, to investigate. Her team includes street-wise teenager Mick O’Reilly and her closest friend Lord Hugh Staunton, whose homosexuality has estranged him from his family. Firth specialized in photographing ghosts; when Sarah visits his widow, Leonora, she’s in the process of contacting the dead. One of her friends advises her to help Sarah: “We have to rule out the possibility that the killer is human.” As in Sarah’s first four cases, Rowland’s knack for drollery and colorful characters is on full display. Strangely, the Firths are connected to a case Sarah’s been trying to solve for years: the wrongful conviction of her father, now a fugitive, for a crime committed by her estranged mother. Firth’s Society for Psychical Studies is virulently opposed by the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought. When Hugh inexplicably disappears and a prominent member of one group is murdered, the probe takes on special urgency.

The plot runs a bit amok, but Rowland’s Victorian London is fascinating and her team of irregulars unmatched.