{"id":5374,"date":"2023-11-10T07:06:30","date_gmt":"2023-11-10T15:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5374"},"modified":"2023-11-10T07:06:30","modified_gmt":"2023-11-10T15:06:30","slug":"rosemary-simpson-murder-wears-a-hidden-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/rosemary-simpson-murder-wears-a-hidden-face\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosemary Simpson: Murder Wears a Hidden Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilded Age #8<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Murder Wears a Hidden Face<\/em> is the eighth book in Rosemary Simpson\u2019s series set in Gilded Age New York City.\u00a0 The two protagonists are Prudence MacKenzie and Geoffrey Hunter, partners in an investigative law and detective firm.\u00a0 Prudence, the daughter of a prominent judge, was raised in New York\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He and Prudence have a slow-burning romance that develops throughout the series.\u00a0 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\u2019t want to get married and lose her independence.<\/p>\n

This novel takes place in 1891 and is set largely in Chinatown.\u00a0 As always with Simpson\u2019s books, the setting is a huge part of the story and becomes another character in the novel.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s affections.\u00a0 Geoffrey still doesn\u2019t trust him.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The dead man\u2019s widow and son ask Prudence and Geoffrey to find out who killed Lord Peng, and they agree.\u00a0 As it turns out, Lord Peng had many powerful enemies within the Chinese government, any one of whom might want him dead.\u00a0 Before coming to New York, he had spent a long time at Queen Victoria\u2019s court in London.\u00a0 His son, who studied naval engineering,\u00a0 is very Westernized and prefers to be called by his English name of Johnny.\u00a0 Lord Peng also has two daughters, An Bao and Mei Sha.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She has formed a friendship with Lowry\u2019s sister on the ship on the way to New York.\u00a0 Also with them is the children\u2019s nurse, Amah, who is quite a formidable woman, with complete loyalty to the family.\u00a0 She has stayed with them even though the children are now adults.<\/p>\n

The Chinese government has ordered the family to return to China, where Lady Peng is afraid her son will be executed in his father\u2019s place.\u00a0 She calls on Prudence and Geoffrey to assist her in allowing them to remain in New York.\u00a0 This is a time when harsh anti-Chinese legislation was in place.\u00a0 The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese laborers from coming to the United States.\u00a0 No Chinese were allowed to become US citizens, and no Chinese women had been allowed to emigrate to the US for even longer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This anti-Chinese prejudice is horrible to read about (but all too timely).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Lady Peng finds help from her husband\u2019s younger brother, who goes by the name Wei Fu Jian.\u00a0 Like many Chinese immigrants, he used a false name when he came the to US.\u00a0 Wei is now a powerful crime boss and one of the wealthiest men in Chinatown.\u00a0 He is also, as it turns out, the man Lady Peng really loved, before she was forced to marry his older brother.\u00a0 Wei will help the family, but at a cost: the son, Johnny, must become his second-in-command and lead a life of crime.\u00a0 They agree because they feel they have no choice and go into hiding in Wei\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, though, a policeman had seen them escape, and Prudence comes with them.\u00a0 Wei\u2019s men who were supposed to meet them have both been murdered.\u00a0 So, Prudence realizes, the assassin knows the family is there.\u00a0 In the next few days, both Johnny and Mei Sha are attacked.\u00a0 They survive, but the killer always manages to escape.\u00a0 Prudence and Geoffrey go undercover to Chinatown, disguised as Christian missionaries to explain their presence there, to find the killer.\u00a0 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\u2019s daughter.\u00a0 There is a developing romance between Matthew and Mei Sha, a thread which is left hanging at the end of the book.\u00a0 I do not know if these characters will reappear later in the series, but I hope they do.<\/p>\n

Prudence and Geoffrey are not sure at first if the assassin\u2019s motive is political or personal, but the attacks on Lord Peng\u2019s children lead them to believe it\u2019s the latter.\u00a0 Geoffrey tracks down various men on a list of recent immigrants who fit the assassin\u2019s description, only to realize they had alibis, or no motive to kill Lord Peng.\u00a0 All the leads they have seem to be dead ends.\u00a0 Prudence and Geoffrey must catch the killer before he strikes again.<\/p>\n

I love the details Simpson gives the reader about life in Chinatown in the 1890s.\u00a0 The book takes place during the Chinese New Year celebrations, and the details are colorful.\u00a0 We learn a lot about Chinese and Chinese-American culture of the time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wei is an interesting, and complex, character, not entirely unlikeable despite his life of crime.\u00a0 He fears the time when gangs from San Francisco will come to New York and become rivals to his crime empire.\u00a0 There are very few women in Chinatown, most of them no longer of childbearing age, and so there are also few children.\u00a0 It is very much a male society, where any women would stand out.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We will have to wait and see what happens.\u00a0 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. \u00a0I will certainly look forward to more books in the series.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At one point, Prudence mentions the members of her social set going to Newport for the season, and I thought of Maxwell\u2019s series.\u00a0 Fans of Tasha Alexander and Dianne Freeman would also enjoy it for the romantic tension between the two main characters.\u00a0 —\u00a0Vicki Kondelik<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gilded Age #8 Murder Wears a Hidden Face is the eighth book in Rosemary Simpson\u2019s series set in Gilded Age New York City.\u00a0 The two protagonists are Prudence MacKenzie and Geoffrey Hunter, partners in an investigative law and detective firm.\u00a0 Prudence, the daughter of a prominent judge, was raised in New York\u2019s high society, but …