Murder at the Serpentine Bridge is the sixth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane Regency mystery series. As the book opens, in 1814, the two protagonists, the Earl of Wrexford and Lady Charlotte Sloane, are a newly married couple, and Charlotte is trying to get used to life as a countess, while inwardly rebelling against the restrictions of Regency high society.
Wrexford is a man of science, a brilliant chemist, who relies on logic and deductive reasoning to solve crimes. Charlotte is a satirical cartoonist who uses the pseudonym A.J. Quill. She had eloped with her drawing teacher when she was very young, and scandalized her family. Now that her first husband is dead and she is married to Wrexford, she is finally accepted back into polite society. In contrast to Wrexford, she uses her intuition and artist’s eye to solve murders. The two complement each other very well. At first I wondered if the series would not be as compelling now that the two of them are married, but I am happy to say I was wrong. Wrexford and Charlotte make a great couple, and the witty dialogue which was a strength of the earlier novels is still there.
Wrexford and Charlotte’s unconventional family includes two street urchins, Raven and Hawk, who had been adopted by Charlotte when she was a widow, and are now Wrexford’s legal wards. The two boys and their adventures are an element which makes this series a delight. They are being brought up as young gentlemen, but they have connections in the seedy streets of London, which they use to help Wrexford and Charlotte solve mysteries. Now the boys, especially Raven, the older one, are growing up, and each has his own interests. Raven has a strong interest in mathematics, while Hawk has a talent for botanical drawing. In this particular book, they are taking fencing lessons, with some hilarious results.
London is preparing for a grand celebration of the victory over Napoleon (not knowing, of course, that he is going to escape from Elba). The sovereigns and dignitaries of the allied nations, including the Tsar of Russia, are all in London for the festivities, which are to include a mock naval battle with small model battleships on the Serpentine, the man-made lake in Hyde Park. Meanwhile, Charlotte feels obliged to attend a party hosted by her brother’s relatives by marriage, the Belmonts. She does not care much for the Belmonts, especially when she sees how badly they treat their young ward, Peregrine, a boy of mixed race who is the son of Belmont’s older brother, and has inherited the title that Belmont thinks should have been his. Peregrine quickly becomes friends with Raven and Hawk, and Charlotte invites him to stay with her family during the festivities. Not to give away too much, but I think Peregrine will become a regular character. He makes a wonderful addition to the series.
While Wrexford, Raven, and Hawk are walking in Hyde Park, they discover a body in the Serpentine. At first Wrexford thinks the death was an accidental drowning, but of course it was murder, and Lord Grentham, Britain’s leading spymaster, orders him to come home early from the family party. The dead man is Jeremiah Willis, a brilliant inventor and a man of mixed race, who was Peregrine’s uncle on his mother’s side of the family. Willis had been working on a powerful weapon which would give any nation that possesses it a huge advantage in battle. The plans and a prototype of the secret weapon are missing, and only a sketch has been found with Willis’ body.
Lord Grentham’s aide Pierson asks Wrexford to find this dangerous weapon before it can be auctioned off to the highest bidder and fall into the wrong hands. He also hints that the government knows Charlotte’s secret identity as A.J. Quill, and threatens to expose it if Wrexford doesn’t cooperate. It is this threat, more than anything else, that makes Wrexford decide to investigate.
Soon Wrexford discovers how, and where, the auction will be conducted: representatives of the allied nations will make sealed bids, which will be collected at the Royal Ascot horse races. Just after the bids are collected, Wrexford finds the dead body of the man who had collected them, and only catches the briefest glimpse of a man on horseback fleeing the scene. More and more bodies pile up before the novel reaches its explosive conclusion.
The plot is very suspenseful, and takes many twists and turns before the end. I thought I had figured out who the murderer was, and then that person turned up dead. Penrose keeps the reader guessing. As always, though, the strength of the series is in the characters, especially Wrexford, Charlotte, and their two wards. Also playing an important role are their friends Sheffield and Cordelia, who have an on-again, off-again romance. Sheffield is Wrexford’s best friend from Oxford, where some of the action of this novel takes place. He has a reputation as a frivolous wastrel, but is actually very intelligent and perceptive. Cordelia is a mathematician, a brilliant woman who is tutoring Raven in mathematics. She was a suspect in a previous case, which is how she and Sheffield met. In this novel, Sheffield is jealous of Cordelia’s friendship with a French mathematician who is in England for the peace celebrations, and who, Wrexford suspects, might be bidding on the secret weapon in order to offer it to Napoleon.
I would also like to draw attention to Penrose’s author’s note, even for readers who don’t usually read authors’ notes. This one is fascinating, as are her notes for all the novels. Each book in the series focuses on a different aspect of Regency science and technology, and Penrose provides excellent background material. This one, of course, is about Regency weaponry and, secondarily, about auction techniques and the 19th century ancestor of modern game theory. This book can stand alone, but I highly recommend the whole series, starting from the beginning, so readers can see how the relationship between Wrexford and Charlotte evolved, and how Raven and Hawk came to be part of their family. I hope there will be many more books to come in this series. — Vicki Kondelik
**********************************************
Vicki Kondelik is a cataloger at the University of Michigan’s Graduate Library, and edits their book review blog, Lost in the Stacks. She writes book reviews for the Historical Novel Society, and is currently writing a historical novel. She has been an avid mystery reader for a long time.