{"id":4587,"date":"2022-09-22T05:47:18","date_gmt":"2022-09-22T12:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4587"},"modified":"2022-09-22T05:47:18","modified_gmt":"2022-09-22T12:47:18","slug":"andrea-penrose-murder-at-the-serpentine-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/andrea-penrose-murder-at-the-serpentine-bridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrea Penrose: Murder at the Serpentine Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Murder at the Serpentine Bridge<\/em> is the sixth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane Regency mystery series.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Wrexford is a man of science, a brilliant chemist, who relies on logic and deductive reasoning to solve crimes.\u00a0 Charlotte is a satirical cartoonist who uses the pseudonym A.J. Quill.\u00a0 She had eloped with her drawing teacher when she was very young, and scandalized her family.\u00a0 Now that her first husband is dead and she is married to Wrexford, she is finally accepted back into polite society.\u00a0 In contrast to Wrexford, she uses her intuition and artist’s eye to solve murders.\u00a0 The two complement each other very well.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wrexford and Charlotte make a great couple, and the witty dialogue which was a strength of the earlier novels is still there.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The two boys and their adventures are an element which makes this series a delight.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now the boys, especially Raven, the older one, are growing up, and each has his own interests.\u00a0 Raven has a strong interest in mathematics, while Hawk has a talent for botanical drawing.\u00a0 In this particular book, they are taking fencing lessons, with some hilarious results.<\/p>\n

London is preparing for a grand celebration of the victory over Napoleon (not knowing, of course, that he is going to escape from Elba).\u00a0 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. \u00a0Meanwhile, Charlotte feels obliged to attend a party hosted by her brother’s relatives by marriage, the Belmonts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Peregrine quickly becomes friends with Raven and Hawk, and Charlotte invites him to stay with her family during the festivities.\u00a0 Not to give away too much, but I think Peregrine will become a regular character.\u00a0 He makes a wonderful addition to the series.<\/p>\n

While Wrexford, Raven, and Hawk are walking in Hyde Park, they discover a body in the Serpentine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Willis had been working on a powerful weapon which would give any nation that possesses it a huge advantage in battle.\u00a0 The plans and a prototype of the secret weapon are missing, and only a sketch has been found with Willis’ body.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is this threat, more than anything else, that makes Wrexford decide to investigate.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 More and more bodies pile up before the novel reaches its explosive conclusion.<\/p>\n

The plot is very suspenseful, and takes many twists and turns before the end. \u00a0I thought I had figured out who the murderer was, and then that person turned up dead.\u00a0 Penrose keeps the reader guessing.\u00a0 As always, though, the strength of the series is in the characters, especially Wrexford, Charlotte, and their two wards.\u00a0 Also playing an important role are their friends Sheffield and Cordelia, who have an on-again, off-again romance.\u00a0 Sheffield is Wrexford’s best friend from Oxford, where some of the action of this novel takes place.\u00a0 He has a reputation as a frivolous wastrel, but is actually very intelligent and perceptive.\u00a0 Cordelia is a mathematician, a brilliant woman who is tutoring Raven in mathematics.\u00a0 She was a suspect in a previous case, which is how she and Sheffield met.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I would also like to draw attention to Penrose’s author’s note, even for readers who don’t usually read authors’ notes.\u00a0 This one is fascinating, as are her notes for all the novels.\u00a0 Each book in the series focuses on a different aspect of Regency science and technology, and Penrose provides excellent background material.\u00a0 This one, of course, is about Regency weaponry and, secondarily, about auction techniques and the 19th century ancestor of modern game theory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hope there will be many more books to come in this series. —\u00a0Vicki Kondelik<\/em><\/p>\n

**********************************************<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Vicki Kondelik is a cataloger at the University of Michigan\u2019s Graduate Library, and edits their book review blog,\u00a0Lost in the Stacks.<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0She writes book reviews for the\u00a0Historical Novel Society<\/a>, and is currently writing a historical novel.\u00a0 She has been an avid mystery reader for a long time.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Murder at the Serpentine Bridge is the sixth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane Regency mystery series.\u00a0 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[930,928,10,162,929,931,273,682],"class_list":["post-4587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1814-london","tag-andrea-penrose","tag-historical","tag-kensington-books","tag-murder-at-the-serpentine-bridge","tag-regency-weaponry","tag-vicki-kondelik","tag-wrexford-and-sloane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4589,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions\/4589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}