September 1, 2020
A chance observation at a fancy ball exposes embezzlement, scandal, and murder. Prudence MacKenzie has little interest in the social prominence that is hers by birth. But she reckons without her redoubtable aunt, the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, an American "dollar princess" who exchanged family money for a title. Lady Rotherton insists on stuffing Prudence into a Worth gown and dragging her to the first Assembly Ball of the New York season, but Prudence goes only on the condition that her business partner, ex-Confederate officer and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter, escort her. At the ball, Lady Rotherton spots paste fakes among real diamonds once intended for Marie Antoinette and now in a necklace adorning the neck of Lena De Vries, the wife of a wealthy financier. William De Vries hires the two-person firm of Hunter and Mackenzie, Investigative Law, to inquire discreetly about the missing gems. A network of street urchins, dedicated servants, and former Pinks point Prudence and Geoffrey toward a gem cutter whom they find dead in his jewelry store. A second murder and a suicide later, the search for the missing diamonds makes a suspect of Lena's son, a gambler and drunkard whose sorry misadventures lead to tragedy, a desperate escape attempt, and an emotional cliffhanger deferred until at least the next installment. Simpson takes her unconventional duo from the upper crust to the lowest dregs of New York society in the Gilded Age.
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October 26, 2020
In Simpson’s satisfying fifth Gilded Age mystery (after 2019’s Death Brings a Shadow), Lady Rotherton, Prudence MacKenzie’s redoubtable aunt married to an English peer, visits New York hoping to persuade her unconventional niece to make a respectable marriage. At the first high-society ball of the season, Lady Rotherton guesses that some of the diamonds in society matron Lena De Vries’s necklace are fake. Her assessment is subsequently confirmed, and William De Vries, Lena’s banker husband, hires former Pinkerton agent Geoffrey Hunter and Prudence, his investigative partner, to discover who replaced the gems. Soon after they find the jeweler most likely to have fenced the stones shot to death, one of the De Vries’ valets dies in an apparent suicide. William believes that Lena’s son by her first marriage, Morgan Whitley, persuaded the valet to help him tamper with the jewels. Though Whitley’s alcohol and gambling addictions leave him desperate for money, Prudence doubts that the young man is to blame. Simpson blends a briskly paced investigation with well-chosen Gilded Age details. Fans of Victoria Thompson and Alyssa Maxwell will be pleased. Agent: Jessica Faust, BookEnds Literary.