Suffragettes seem to be turning up left and right in my reading at the moment. Ursula Marlowe is a suffragette I had encountered in my past reading and liked very much and so was very disappointed when she appeared in only two novels, before doing a short disappearing act. Happily she has finally resurfaced in a new book, so I dug out her first adventure, Consequences of Sin, and dusted it off and enjoyed it just as much this time around as the first. There are a handful of fictional heroines I would love to 'meet' (Amelia Peabody and Maisie Dobbs to name but two) and I am sure Ursula Marlowe would be an interesting and clever friend to have. I'd go to a suffragette meeting with her anytime.
Considering her father is a self-made man, a wealthy mill owner and proper Edwardian gentleman living in Belgravia Square, Ursula should really be contemplating making a good match and buying frilly things to wear, maybe attending country house parties, instead she goes to WPSU meetings, reads H.G. Wells (Ann Veronica), has something of a past with a Russian emigre and counts among her friends a woman who dresses as a man. As a matter of fact it's her friend Winifred Stanford-Jones who will get Ursula involved with murder. It's almost surprising really that her father is so indulgent with her (up to a point that is), but perhaps because her mother died when Ursula was very young he gives her more space than most young women of that period would enjoy.
Winifred calls Ursula one night in a state of distress, and she is not one to usually lose control of her emotions. There's no one else she can turn to, and Ursula realizes just how right that is since in Winifred's bed is a naked woman who has been murdered. Freddie has no recollection of what happened to her lover and now no one to turn to. And now Ursula must summon the courage to ask for help from the one man she dreads being in debt to--Lord Oliver Wrotham. Wrotham is her father's trusted adviser, a King's Council, a bit stuffy and very upright but someone who Ursula knows she can trust to make sense of a seemingly senseless and inexplicable murder.
Lord Wrotham is quite successful for his age, much younger than her father. He has a title but not the funds to match, his older brother having led a dissipated life and spending the family's wealth before dying. Wrotham is a bit of a paradox--conventional and fairly conservative, always right in his thinking yet there is something about him--an artistic side. Not exactly someone who just prefers the finer things in life, but more a contemporary open-mindedness. There are, unsurprisingly, sparks between the two, but Ursula is determined to be independent and forward thinking and will Wrotham be able to match her liberality?
Both will be tested as it's not just Freddie who has been targeted but all the young people in Ursula's social group, some simply peers rather than good friends. Their families make up a tight-knit group with shared histories and those histories twine together with secrets that everyone would prefer remained hidden. Two decades earlier Ursula's father was part of an expedition to Venezuela that has been shrouded in mystery and thought long forgotten. Freddie's possible implication into murder is only the very tip of the iceberg. Something terrible was covered up and now someone wants to make sure it is finally brought to light.
This is a mystery that will see Ursula lose almost everything she holds dear and a flight to South America herself to try and discover just what is at the heart of all the horrible things that seem to be happening to those around her she most loves. You might expect that an Edwardian mystery would move at a stately progress but it is actually quite a pacy mystery with a likable but conflicted heroine and a few twists and turns along the way. She's not afraid to be daring, and is maybe even a little too fearless sometimes for her own good.
I've already started reading the second Ursula Marlowe mystery, The Serpent and the Scorpion, which is set in part in Egypt. There are unresolved questions concerning just what Lord Wrotham is to Ursula, and that Russian emigre hinted at in the first book is going to return in the second to make things nice and complicated. All this is in anticipation for finally reading Clare Langley-Hawthorne's newest Ursula Marlowe novel, Unlikely Traitors, which I have been waiting ages for. Maybe now I can finally find out what happens between Ursula and Oliver!