What Cannot Be Said

[cornerofmadness]

What Cannot Be Said by C.S. Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This felt like a nice return to the older mysteries in the series with the true history (such as Napoleon) being relegated to the background instead of being half the action of the mystery. I was getting a little tired of that.

In the park (something you had to pay to enter in those days, to keep out the poor) Lady McInnis and her daughter Emma were murdered and ritually laid out to be found by her young niece and nephew, Arabella and Percy. The way they were displayed mirrors Sebastian's friend, Sir Henry Lovejoy a bowstreet runner's wife's murder. Lovejoy knows he found his wife's killer and he hung for it, right?

They are forced to admit maybe Henry had been wrong. Worse, another death like the others takes a young candy shop girl. What did she have in common with Lady McInnis? And because these books do have a formula, something has to happen to make Sebastian's powerful father in law Jarvis to take action against Sebastian. This time it's one of the suspects is Rhodes, one of the Prince Regent's favorite illegitimate sons.

In the background we have the pregnant Hero who is also helping to raise the son of Sebastian's possible half brother (and weathering the talk that the boy is one of Sebastian's bastards because of the strong resemblance) and we have Gibson spiraling so far out of control with his opium addiction, his lover has to step in as what passes for a medical examiner in the early 1800s.

I knew fairly early on who and why as far as the culprit went but that did not diminish my enjoyment of this. This one is dark though and the ending isn't a particularly happy one (satisfying though). I always love getting to spend time in Sebastian and Hero's world.



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