A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

image from Library Thing

I am on a Victorian England kick it seems - and here is another book set in that time frame.

Charles Lenox is the English amateur detective and aristocrat called to the scene of the startling death of a young maid...perhaps a suicide, perhaps not.  Charles and his butler,  Graham, set about investigating this puzzling death - it looks like she drank arsenic - but Charles is not fooled..in the bottom of the glass he discovers something else, the remains of a much more deadly and rare poison.  But, why would someone want to murder a maid?

Charles is helped in this investigation by by a cast of other characters - Lady Gray, his neighbor and confidante, a Scotland yard cop, an investigator and a one-time chemist.

It's been a while since I've read a straight up mystery.  This took me a while to get involved in. There were many mentions to previous cases that I didn't really get, and an overall assumption that I understood all about footmen, and poor nephews and much of English class structure.

So, although I liked the characters and the mystery itself was rather intriguing. It moved a bit slowly for me.