Stevie‘s review of Murder in the East End (A Below Stairs Mystery, Book 4) by Jennifer Ashley
Historical Mystery published by Berkley 04 Aug 20
I’m really appreciating all the snippets of everyday Victorian life we get to see in the course of Kat Holloway’s adventures. This story is no exception, beginning as it does with Kat and her fellow below-stairs staff working hard to prepare and deliver a luxurious meal at short notice to impress their employer’s dinner guests. Into all this barely contained chaos steps the son of Kat’s great, if mysterious, friend Daniel McAdam with a summons for Kat from his father. This, obviously, heralds the beginning of a new mystery for Kat and Daniel, along with all Kat’s other usual helpers, to investigate.
This time Kat finds herself working on behalf of a man Daniel refers to as his brother, another former street urchin raised by the same man who took Daniel in. The Reverend Errol Fielding turns out to be both more and less respectable than Daniel. He’s an Oxford-educated clergyman with a parish in the East End, and who has additional duties with several charitable organisations, but whom Daniel refers to as a rogue only really interested in bettering himself. One charity that Fielding works on behalf of is the Foundling Hospital, which, as an aside, is a very real place still – albeit that it’s now a museum – and somewhere I would probably have visited by now were it not for this year’s pandemic. He reports that a number of children taken in by the charity are unaccounted for and the nurse who alerted him to their disappearance has since vanished herself.
Kat agrees to help, and to speak to others in her kitchen with knowledge of the hospital, but very soon the case takes a sinister turn when the missing nurse is found beaten to death. Meanwhile, Fielding’s involvement in the goings-on turns out to be more complicated than he initially admitted to, and Kat is caught up in complex household politics back at her employer’s home once again. Fortunately she has an ally in the form of Lady Cynthia’s new friend, an artist who wants to paint Kat at work in her kitchen, and who is also keen to help Kat, and the ever useful Lady Cynthia herself, with the case of the missing children.
Although the cast of this series keeps expanding, the characters are all very distinct and incredibly memorable. There’s some progress in Kat’s relationship with Daniel, although his past – as well as his present duties – keeps getting in the way of Kat’s willingness to get fully involved. It was good to watch her spending some of her free time with her growing daughter as well.
All in all, another superb addition to this most excellent series.
Grade: A
Summary:
When young cook Kat Holloway learns that the children of London’s Foundling Hospital are mysteriously disappearing and one of their nurses has been murdered, she can’t turn away. She enlists the help of her charming and enigmatic confidant Daniel McAdam, who has ties to Scotland Yard, and Errol Fielding, a disreputable man from Daniel’s troubled past, to bring the killer to justice. Their investigation takes them from the grandeur of Mayfair to the slums of the East End, during which Kat learns more about Daniel and his circumstances than she ever could have imagined.
Read an excerpt.
Other books in this series:
