Gilded Age #8
Murder Wears a Hidden Face is the eighth book in Rosemary Simpson’s series set in Gilded Age New York City. The two protagonists are Prudence MacKenzie and Geoffrey Hunter, partners in an investigative law and detective firm. Prudence, the daughter of a prominent judge, was raised in New York’s high society, but rebelled against her upbringing and became only the second woman in New York State to pass the bar exam, even though she still cannot argue cases in court. Geoffrey, who is somewhat older than Prudence, is a former Pinkerton agent and a Southerner who came north around the time of the Civil War because of his antislavery beliefs. He and Prudence have a slow-burning romance that develops throughout the series. Geoffrey was quicker to acknowledge his feelings than Prudence was, but now she is beginning to recognize her attraction to Geoffrey as what it is, even though she still doesn’t want to get married and lose her independence.
This novel takes place in 1891 and is set largely in Chinatown. As always with Simpson’s books, the setting is a huge part of the story and becomes another character in the novel. It opens with the murder of Lord Peng, a Chinese diplomat, at the opening of an exhibition of Chinese art and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum. The guests at the opening, including Prudence and Geoffrey, witness the murder, but the killer gets away and vanishes into the streets of New York, without anyone getting a clear look at his face. Geoffrey and Warren Lowry, a former police detective, pursue him, but without success, and they figure that he has gone to Chinatown and will be well-hidden there. Lowry had helped Prudence on an earlier case involving his sister, while Geoffrey was recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound, and for a while it looked as though he and Geoffrey would be rivals for Prudence’s affections. Geoffrey still doesn’t trust him. In this book, Lowry disappears from the story relatively early on, after he recommends a police officer assigned to Chinatown, Alfred Hanrahan, to work with Prudence and Geoffrey on the case.
The dead man’s widow and son ask Prudence and Geoffrey to find out who killed Lord Peng, and they agree. As it turns out, Lord Peng had many powerful enemies within the Chinese government, any one of whom might want him dead. Before coming to New York, he had spent a long time at Queen Victoria’s court in London. His son, who studied naval engineering, is very Westernized and prefers to be called by his English name of Johnny. Lord Peng also has two daughters, An Bao and Mei Sha. An Bao is very much the traditional Chinese lady, with bound feet, who expects to marry a man who is chosen for her, while Mei Sha is the complete opposite. Her feet were never bound, since her family left for England when she was still too young, and she was educated at an English boarding school, where she rebelled against the rules. She has formed a friendship with Lowry’s sister on the ship on the way to New York. Also with them is the children’s nurse, Amah, who is quite a formidable woman, with complete loyalty to the family. She has stayed with them even though the children are now adults.
The Chinese government has ordered the family to return to China, where Lady Peng is afraid her son will be executed in his father’s place. She calls on Prudence and Geoffrey to assist her in allowing them to remain in New York. This is a time when harsh anti-Chinese legislation was in place. The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese laborers from coming to the United States. No Chinese were allowed to become US citizens, and no Chinese women had been allowed to emigrate to the US for even longer. In one scene, Prudence asks two politicians, one from each party, who had been friends of her father, to use their influence to help the Pengs stay in the US, but both refuse as soon as they learn the people Prudence wants to help are Chinese. This anti-Chinese prejudice is horrible to read about (but all too timely).
When she realizes she will get no help from the government in allowing the family to stay, Prudence decides the only solution is for them to go into hiding in Chinatown. Lady Peng finds help from her husband’s younger brother, who goes by the name Wei Fu Jian. Like many Chinese immigrants, he used a false name when he came the to US. Wei is now a powerful crime boss and one of the wealthiest men in Chinatown. He is also, as it turns out, the man Lady Peng really loved, before she was forced to marry his older brother. Wei will help the family, but at a cost: the son, Johnny, must become his second-in-command and lead a life of crime. They agree because they feel they have no choice and go into hiding in Wei’s house.
As it turns out, though, a policeman had seen them escape, and Prudence comes with them. Wei’s men who were supposed to meet them have both been murdered. So, Prudence realizes, the assassin knows the family is there. In the next few days, both Johnny and Mei Sha are attacked. They survive, but the killer always manages to escape. Prudence and Geoffrey go undercover to Chinatown, disguised as Christian missionaries to explain their presence there, to find the killer. They have help from Officer Hanrahan, who everyone thinks is Irish but is really part Chinese, and from Matthew Lam, a young Yale-educated man who is the son of a Chinese father and a white missionary’s daughter. There is a developing romance between Matthew and Mei Sha, a thread which is left hanging at the end of the book. I do not know if these characters will reappear later in the series, but I hope they do.
Prudence and Geoffrey are not sure at first if the assassin’s motive is political or personal, but the attacks on Lord Peng’s children lead them to believe it’s the latter. Geoffrey tracks down various men on a list of recent immigrants who fit the assassin’s description, only to realize they had alibis, or no motive to kill Lord Peng. All the leads they have seem to be dead ends. Prudence and Geoffrey must catch the killer before he strikes again.
I love the details Simpson gives the reader about life in Chinatown in the 1890s. The book takes place during the Chinese New Year celebrations, and the details are colorful. We learn a lot about Chinese and Chinese-American culture of the time. Because of the exclusionary laws, most of the residents of Chinatown were men, many of whom came to the US to work on the transcontinental railway. After the railway was completed, they were out of a job, and many of them ended up working for crime bosses like Wei Fu Jian. Wei is an interesting, and complex, character, not entirely unlikeable despite his life of crime. He fears the time when gangs from San Francisco will come to New York and become rivals to his crime empire. There are very few women in Chinatown, most of them no longer of childbearing age, and so there are also few children. It is very much a male society, where any women would stand out.
I highly recommend this book, which stands on its own, even though of course it helps to have read the earlier books to see how the relationship between Prudence and Geoffrey develops. The relationship seems to be at a standstill in this book, at least at first, with Geoffrey interested in marriage and Prudence wanting to maintain her independence, but there is a welcome turn at the very end, which, I hope, will lead to a further development in the next book. We will have to wait and see what happens. I also hope the Chinatown characters, especially the Peng family and Matthew Lam, will reappear, even though it seems Prudence and Geoffrey will not be revisiting Chinatown soon. I will certainly look forward to more books in the series. I highly recommend this series for fans of Victoria Thompson, who writes about a slightly later time and who, I think, also set one of her books in Chinatown, as well as Alyssa Maxwell, who writes about the same period, but in Newport. At one point, Prudence mentions the members of her social set going to Newport for the season, and I thought of Maxwell’s series. Fans of Tasha Alexander and Dianne Freeman would also enjoy it for the romantic tension between the two main characters. — Vicki Kondelik