When Lizzie Dowling, Queen Victoria\u2019s Irish-born parlor maid, is found drowned near the Quarr Abbey ruins on the Isle of Wight, Julia, who happens to be vacationing there with her grandfather, examines the body over the objections of the local constabulary that the death was obviously accidental and a woman has no business messing with corpses. Julia, Scotland Yard\u2019s first female medical examiner, doesn\u2019t establish conclusively that Lizzie was murdered, but she does discover that she was four months pregnant. And when Lizzie\u2019s younger sister, Brigid, who\u2019s been summoned from Cork by Lady Susan Styles, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, is strangled along the way, it\u2019s hard to believe that both women weren\u2019t killed by the same person for the same shadowy reason. Once his pursuit of criminal fugitive Edgar Romilly ends with an unexpected jolt that sends him back home, Richard is free to rejoin Julia to solve this new case. The path to a solution will lead through thieves, smugglers, gunrunners, multiple murders, and several acts of anti-English terrorism, rumored and actual. Sadly, it also leads though dozens of characters, some real, some fictional, some aristocratic, some impoverished, but very few of them memorable, before the secrets that link the Dowling sisters, the royal family, and the Troubles come to light with little detective work by Julia and not much more by Richard.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Lizzie Dowling, Queen Victoria\u2019s Irish-born parlor maid, is found drowned near the Quarr Abbey ruins on the Isle of Wight, Julia, who happens to be vacationing there with her grandfather, examines the body over the objections of the local constabulary that the death was obviously accidental and a woman has no business messing with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}