Following my thoroughly satisfying read of Harris’s previous St. Cyr mystery, Who Cries For the Lost, I was pleased to receive an audiobook “arc” of the latest and nineteenth, What Cannot Be Said. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Sebastian and Hero, with Paul Gibson and Alexi Sauvage, and Bow Street magistrate, Lovejoy. What Cannot Be Said is set against the background of a Napoleon afloat and in limbo on an English ship: whither Napoleon? Back to France and execution? At his request, to settle as an English gentleman farmer? Exile? By the end of the tragedy and horror comprising this St. Cyr mystery, Napoleon’s fate, a question at novel’s start, frames the narrative and arrives to its end when Jarvis brings news of whither Napoleon.

On Harris’s canvas, a mystery bringing to light the injustices and cruelty of a time and place that will lead to the 19th and 20th century’s revolutions: the horrors of slavery, the cruelty of child labour, the vulnerability of destitute women, sexual violence, and the mistreatment of the mentally ill. Not an easy narrative, but as always, a compelling one, and mitigated by the series’s readers’ affection for its moral core, Sebastian, Hero, Paul, Alexi, and Lovejoy. The details follow, thanks to the publisher’s blurb:

July 1815: The Prince Regent’s grandiose plans to celebrate Napoléon’s recent defeat at Waterloo are thrown into turmoil when Lady McInnis and her daughter Emma are found brutally murdered in Richmond Park, their bodies posed in a chilling imitation of the stone effigies once found atop medieval tombs. Bow Street magistrate Sir Henry Lovejoy immediately turns to his friend Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help with the investigation. For as Devlin discovers, Lovejoy’s own wife and daughter were also murdered in Richmond Park, their bodies posed in the same bizarre postures. A traumatized ex-soldier was hanged for their killings. So is London now confronting a malicious copyist? Or did Lovejoy help send an innocent man to the gallows?

Aided by his wife, Hero, who knew Lady McInnis from her work with poor orphans, Devlin finds himself exploring a host of unsavory characters from a vicious chimneysweep to a smiling but decidedly lethal baby farmer. Also coming under increasing scrutiny is Sir Ivo McInnis himself, along with a wounded Waterloo veteran—who may or may not have been Laura McInnis’s lover—and a charismatic young violinist who moonlights as a fencing master and may have formed a dangerous relationship with Emma. But when Sebastian’s investigation turns toward man about town Basil Rhodes, he quickly draws the fury of the Palace, for Rhodes is well known as the Regent’s favorite illegitimate son.

Then Lady McInnis’s young niece and nephew are targeted by the killer, and two more women are discovered murdered and arranged in similar postures. With his own life increasingly in danger, Sebastian finds himself drawn inexorably toward a conclusion far darker and more horrific than anything he could have imagined. (more…)