As a dear friend says, Harris’s mystery series is the only one for which I’ll eagerly and gladly buy a hardback. Okay, my hardback was discounted this time around, but still. I can’t think of any other series other than my beloved Nelson and Ruth (thank you Elly Griffiths) where I read with such affection, pleasure, and interest (okay, also Montclair’s Sparks and Bainbridge).

I’ve thought about what makes for this reading experience: partly, it’s authors who write with such ease reading their books is like sinking into quiet waters, no matter their content of murder and mayhem; it’s also they’ve created main characters one loves to be with. Their main characters are ethical and smart, share a wry humour and yet look on the world with an eye to making it fair and just. At the heart of Harris’s Regency world is Sebastian St. Cyr and his family, his beloved wife Hero and son Simon and adopted son, Patrick; his powerful, realpolitik father-in-love Jarvis; his father Hendon; his friend, the brilliant surgeon and “coroner” Paul Gibson and midwife-doctor lover, Alexi Sauvage; his friend and former mistress Kat Boleyn and world of Regency London with its dissipated prince and arch enemy Napoleon, whose warring ways have scarred so many of his native French-men and women and English, including our sleuthing hero Sebastian.

In Who Cries for the Lost, Sebastian is seething with the need to join his fellow soldiers as they prepare to take on Napoleon once again for the great confrontation at Waterloo. A leg injury keeps him home and his deep love and contentment with Hero and sons keep him grounded. But bodies are fished out of the Thames and Sebastian is once again called on to solve murders; the publisher’s blurb fills in the details:

June 1815. The people of London wait, breathlessly, for news as Napoleon and the forces united against him hurtle toward their final reckoning at Waterloo. Among them is Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, frustrated to find himself sidelined while recovering from a dangerous wound he recently received in Paris. When the mutilated corpse of Major Miles Sedgewick surfaces from the murky waters of the Thames, Sebastian is drawn into the investigation of a murder that threatens one of his oldest and dearest friends, Irish surgeon Paul Gibson.

Gibson’s lover, Alexi Sauvage, was tricked into a bigamous marriage with the victim. But there are other women who may have wanted the cruel, faithless Major dead. His mistress, his neglected wife, and their young governess who he seduced all make for compelling suspects. Even more interesting to Sebastian is one of Sedgewick’s fellow officers, a man who shared Sedgewick’s macabre interest in both old English folklore and the occult. And then there’s a valuable list of Londoners who once spied for Napoleon that Sedgewick was said to be transporting to Charles, Lord Jarvis, the Regent’s powerful cousin who also happens to be Sebastian’s own father-in-law.

The deeper Sebastian delves into Sedgewick’s life, the more he learns about the Major’s many secrets and the list of people who could have wanted him dead grows even longer. Soon others connected to Sedgewick begin to die strange, brutal deaths and more evidence emerges that links Alexi to the crimes. Certain that Gibson will be implicated alongside his lover, Sebastian finds himself in a desperate race against time to stop the killings and save his friends from the terror of the gallows.

While the blurb suggests a great role for Paul and Alexi in the narrative, this isn’t quite so. Yes, they’re connected, but more bodies bob out of the Thames and the mystery turns into concentric circles of plot within plot and implication within implication. The murders are political, military, personal and vengeful. They are about what war exacts and peace demands and history implicates. Sebastian and Hero are at the heart of solving the convoluted resolution of separating guilty from innocent, victims from perpetrators and abetters. It’s a tangled web of political interest and historical expediency, which make the peace and love of Sebastian and Hero’s life in stark contrast to the tragedies they confront. As the mystery draws to a close with revelations and vindication, the Napoleonic Era also closes with the news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo and our characters seem to close the series with new beginnings.

Harris’s series is elegant, that’s the word it most reminds me of; despite mutilated corpses, what shines through is a renewed hope in the world, in peace, and in the love and affection of friendship and marriage. If you haven’t read the series, go back to book one and start there, the journey is worth its eighteen volumes and I shall dig into the nineteen forthwith.