This capable mystery focuses on a curious protagonist, Lily, whose rather mysterious past leads her to leave behind her medical background (for reasons which remain obscure in this book; perhaps they will be explored in subsequent publications) and a life in India to return to London, where her apothecary family's residence was, to establish a private investigator bureau, World's End. As a neophyte investigator, work is intermittent at best, so she spends most of her days finding lost dogs and investigating unfaithful partners, until a man comes to her office with a curious story.

This is a pleasant, albeit rather short novel that does an admirable job of negotiating the Victorian era, although it is a bit stereotypical (a murdered prostitute, ample misogyny, a surfeit of séance and spiritism, which was all the rage in the late nineteenth century, as was an obsession with all things ancient Egyptian, and everyone is constantly drinking tea, for instance). My primary contention, however, is that it starts out quite slow, and the story tends to continue to lag, but the character development is more than adequate and the descriptions of the environments in which the characters find themselves is on the whole engaging. I would read more by this author, as I'm quite interested on her take on medieval mysteries.

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