bookheaven | The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne by Elsa Hart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was pleasantly surprised by this impulse buy. It was fun having a historical mystery that isn't in the Victorian era (It's set in 1703). Cecily Kay has been sent back to England by her husband for being too inquisitive and discovering something in the company that he should have. He does allow her to stop first at the titular cabinets of Barnaby Mayne to research some of the plants she has pressed on her tour of the middle east.

In the days before public museums, cabinets of curiosities amassed by the wealthy like Barnaby Mayne are where the lucky few go to see objects collected from around the world. It was the infancy of scientific collecting and catagorizing. When Cecily arrives, she finds a childhood friend, Meacan is also there, now a sought-after scientific illustrator and the two women reconnect but Meacan has a secret of her own.

In short order the pompous and unfriendly Mayne is murdered, his young assistant blurting out he'd done it before running away. Cecily doesn't believe the assistant as the killer adds up and tries to figure it out on her own, impeded by the fact the man's widow wants to sell off the cabinets as fast as possible as she hates it (and London she has lived apart from her husband for years) and by the constraints on women in the early 1700s.

I found the mystery engaging and I very much liked Cecily and Meacan. I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story. It was also nice to see slightly older, married/widowed women as the protagonists. All too often it's either the young or the elderly we see as amateur sleuths. I'm hoping there'll be more adventures (which the open ending suggests there will be).

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