THE HOUSE ON GRAVEYARD LANE

A showstopping exhibition of violence in London’s well-named Hades Gallery is only the prologue to the latest Golden Age mystery for Rachel Savernake.

Damaris Gethin, the Queen of Surrealism, has ended her yearslong creative drought with an exhibit called “Artist in Crime.” Among the guests on hand for her opening are her ex-lover Capt. Roderick Malam, once-popular songwriter Evan Tucker, social butterfly Kiki de Villiers, and Rachel, whom Damaris, decked out as Marie Antoinette, asks to solve a murder—her own future murder. A few minutes later, she climbs the platform to a guillotine installed in the gallery and executes herself. Rachel, convinced that the suicide she just witnessed must have been a reaction against some grievous wrong visited on Damaris, vows to track down the instigator. But Edwards shoves both women, living and dead, aside to throw the spotlight on someone who never appears or is even named: the VIP whom Kiki has become involved with, a liaison so threatening to England’s national security that Clarion crime reporter Jacob Flint is forced to kill the story he’s been writing on Kiki, who removes herself to Sepulchre House, a home her wealthy husband keeps in Rye. That’s where Duncalf, an assassin commissioned by His Majesty’s government, is sent to kill her. So many more complications follow that readers who are still focused on the riddle of who moved the Queen of Surrealism to end her life will be grateful for the retro Cluefinder that will remind them of all the revealing earlier passages they passed over unawares.

A veritable anthology of whodunit and thriller tropes and character types from between the wars.