{"id":5978,"date":"2024-09-19T06:27:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T13:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5978"},"modified":"2024-09-19T06:27:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T13:27:57","slug":"andrea-penrose-murder-at-kings-crossing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/andrea-penrose-murder-at-kings-crossing\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrea Penrose: Murder at King’s Crossing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wrexford & Sloane #8<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Murder at King’s Crossing<\/em> is the eighth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane series set in Regency England.\u00a0 The two protagonists are the Earl of Wrexford, a chemist and amateur sleuth, and his wife Charlotte Sloane, who, under the name of A.J. Quill, is England’s leading satirical cartoonist.\u00a0 Wrexford has a logical mind and relies on deductive reasoning and the scientific method to solve crimes, while Charlotte uses her intuition and her artist’s eye for detail.\u00a0 Usually they arrive at the same conclusion using very different methods.<\/p>\n

Their extended family includes their two wards, former street urchins Raven and Hawk, collectively known as the Weasels, who help them in crime solving since they know their way around the seedier parts of London.\u00a0 Sometimes Charlotte will join them, disguised as an urchin named Magpie.\u00a0 Raven and Hawk have their own talents: Raven’s is mathematics and Hawk’s is art and botany.\u00a0 Now there is a third boy in the family: Peregrine, a child of mixed race and the orphaned heir to an earldom, who appeared in the last few books but becomes Wrexford’s and Charlotte’s official ward, and a member of the band of Weasels, in this one.<\/p>\n

The novel takes place in 1814, while Napoleon is exiled to the island of Elba and the European powers are preparing for the Congress of Vienna.\u00a0 With the end of the war (or so everyone thinks), the scientific communities of England and France are hoping to work more closely together, and this forms the background to the novel.\u00a0 The Wrexfords’ friends, Christopher Sheffield and Lady Cordelia Mansfield, are finally getting married, at the Wrexfords’ country estate, after an on-again, off-again courtship.\u00a0 Sheffield is an investor in a shipping company, and he hopes to see the business thrive with the end of hostilities.\u00a0 Cordelia is a mathematician who, in male disguise, has attended lectures at Cambridge.<\/p>\n

The wedding festivities, however, are interrupted by the arrival of the magistrate and the coroner.\u00a0 A corpse has been found under the bridge at King’s Crossing, and the only clue to the body’s identity is an invitation to the wedding–an invitation that belongs to Cordelia’s cousin Oliver, who never showed up.\u00a0 Of course, Cordelia thinks the dead man is Oliver, but, after the authorities describe the body, she realizes it’s a childhood friend of hers, a brilliant engineer named Jasper Milton.<\/p>\n

Cordelia, Oliver, and Milton had been very close as children, but they had grown apart, and Cordelia hadn’t seen either man for a long time.\u00a0 Milton had been working on a revolutionary new bridge design, which would make bridges longer and able to hold more weight.\u00a0 This would make it easier to transport people and goods across the country, and it would help the working class because, with ease of travel, workers would not be confined to a place where they work in bad conditions, for little pay.\u00a0 Instead, they could more easily seek employment elsewhere.\u00a0 At the time of his death, Milton had made plans for his innovative bridge design, but they are not found on his body, so it is assumed the murderer has taken them.<\/p>\n

Oliver is also an engineer working on bridge design, but he is slightly less brilliant than Milton.\u00a0 His design involves strengthening the materials used to build a bridge, while Milton’s involves advanced mathematics.\u00a0 The two young men were members of a scientific group called the Revolutions-Per-Minute Society, based at Cambridge and devoted to innovations in transportation.\u00a0 Cordelia and Charlotte talk to the other members of the group, and the only clue they can find is that Oliver quarreled publicly with Milton shortly before the murder.\u00a0 That, of course, makes Oliver the prime suspect.\u00a0 But where is he, and how did Milton end up with Oliver’s invitation to Cordelia’s wedding?\u00a0 Cordelia is convinced her cousin is innocent, but she is also afraid he may have fallen victim to the murderer.<\/p>\n

The Wrexfords, Sheffield, and Cordelia soon return to London and find out that the members of the Revolutions-Per-Minute Society are also going there to meet with a group of French scientists in hopes of a future collaboration.\u00a0 One of the French scientists is a young woman, Isabelle Benoit, who becomes very upset at the mention of Oliver and Milton.\u00a0 Clearly she’s hiding something.\u00a0 Also in London, and somehow connected to the scientific group, is a group of French political radicals who wish to help Napoleon escape and return him to power.\u00a0 Could Milton, with his sympathies for the working class, have been involved with the radicals, and could he have offered them the plans for his innovation in bridge design?<\/p>\n

A web of intrigue grows around the three factions–the British scientists, the French scientists, and the French radicals–and several more people end up dead.\u00a0 All are looking for Milton’s plans.\u00a0 When a set of plans is found on one of the corpses, Cordelia quickly realizes they must be fake because Milton would never make the mathematical errors she finds in them.\u00a0 So where are the real plans?\u00a0 Wrexford, Charlotte, and the Weasels must sort everything out before more deaths occur.<\/p>\n

This is a very suspenseful novel, and it is intricately constructed with all the different groups, sometimes working together and sometimes at odds with each other.\u00a0 I have to say I guessed early on who the murderer was, but that didn’t bother me, because I was still in suspense about how that person would be caught, and I was wrong about which side some of the other characters were on.\u00a0 One of the strengths of this series is Penrose’s use of Regency science and technology.\u00a0 Each book features a different innovation.\u00a0 Earlier books have dealt with, among other things, calculating machines, steamboats, and locomotives.\u00a0 The technological innovation here, of course, is the design of longer and stronger bridges, which would ultimately lead to the invention of the suspension bridge.\u00a0 Penrose’s author’s note is, as usual, fascinating, and she explains the mathematics behind bridge design in a way that non-mathematicians can understand.\u00a0 Also, I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of female mathematicians and scientists: the fictitious Cordelia Mansfield and Isabelle Benoit, and the real-life engineer and entrepreneur Sarah Guppy<\/a>, who, in the novel, has worked closely with Oliver.\u00a0 Penrose tells us more about her in the author’s note.<\/p>\n

I highly recommend Penrose’s series to fans of other Regency mystery authors such as Darcie Wilde and Celeste Connally.\u00a0 Also, having recently reread Elizabeth Peters’ Crocodile on the Sandbank<\/em>, I can see some similarities between Peters’ characters and Penrose’s (whether intentional or not, I don’t know).\u00a0 I do know that Peters’ book had a huge influence on later historical\/romantic mysteries.\u00a0 Charlotte and Wrexford have much in common with Amelia and Emerson: the irascible man and the independent-minded woman who dislike each other at first, then fall in love.\u00a0 Of course, this is part of a tradition that goes back to Much Ado About Nothing<\/em> and Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Cordelia and Charlotte are reading Pride and Prejudice<\/em> in this novel.\u00a0 Also, Charlotte’s situation has much in common with that of Evelyn, Amelia Peabody’s companion and, eventually, sister-in-law.\u00a0 As a young woman, Charlotte had eloped to Italy with her art teacher, a man who turned out not to be who she thought he was.\u00a0 Much the same thing happens to Evelyn, but at least Charlotte’s art teacher marries her before he dies.\u00a0 I am sure Penrose’s series will appeal to Elizabeth Peters’ fans.\u00a0 Murder at King’s Crossing<\/em> stands on its own, but I highly recommend reading the series from the beginning, to learn more about the characters and their relationships.\u00a0 After a while, Penrose’s characters will seem like old friends.\u00a0\u00a0— Vicki Kondelik<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wrexford & Sloane #8 Murder at King’s Crossing is the eighth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane series set in Regency England.\u00a0 The two protagonists are the Earl of Wrexford, a chemist and amateur sleuth, and his wife Charlotte Sloane, who, under the name of A.J. Quill, is England’s leading satirical cartoonist.\u00a0 Wrexford has … 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":[928,1848,10,162,1847,460,273,682],"class_list":["post-5978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-andrea-penrose","tag-building-bridges","tag-historical","tag-kensington-books","tag-murder-at-kings-crossing","tag-regency-england","tag-vicki-kondelik","tag-wrexford-and-sloane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5978","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=5978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5980,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5978\/revisions\/5980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}