Shadows...

Where Shadows Dance
C. S. Harris
NAL Hardcover

ISBN # 978-0451232236
List Price: $24.95
 
http://www.csharris.net/where-shadows-dance.php

Love this series about a Regency lord who hunts murderers and the impressive period detail that C.S. Harris/ aka Candice Proctor brings to what could be a rather ordinary Regency mystery/romance. It has many of the trappings but Harris is always after something new.

I've yet to  ready any fiction that captures the feeling of the period the way the incredible and well researched biography Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman does. I mean the book, not the weak and inaccurate Keira Knightly vehicle. The duchess was a leading female politician, the Hilary Clinton of her day, who still  had many of the vices of her time like constant gambling, heavy debt,  and numerous affairs but she was still incredibly influential on the Whig politics of the day. A lot of Regency novels, (the immortal Jane Austen's among them), do not touch on the reality of the complex Regency Period wars and politics but Harris does, at least somewhat. As novels of the Regency period, Harris' St. Cyr mysteries are well done and richly imagined. Candice Proctor is a scholar of the French Revolution (as well as the author of several  other genre novels) and it shows in the level of detail and the research.

In the latest, Sebastian (Viscount St. Cyr) has to help anatomist Paul Gibson hunt for a murderer when it is illegal to even have obtained the body in the first place. At the same time, he has to get Hero Jarvis, his reluctant bride, to the altar. So it is in part police procedural, part Regency romance, and part historical fiction about the dark days of the Regency,  the Napoleonic wars, and the intrigue and treachery of those times. I must say I like Hero as a character much better than his old flame Kat Boleyn; Hero is much more a modern woman and pretty tough as well. Enjoyable from start to finish.

 

London circa 1800