Painters’ sitters are vanishing, too—women viewed by some as dispensable outcasts. Inspector Richard Tennant, however, takes the attacks seriously, suspecting they’re linked to the poison-pen letters received by additional members of the Allingham family. For Julia, the issue is complicated by Tennant’s previous relationship with Mary’s sister-in-law, Louisa, and by her own surprising reaction to that entanglement.
But when someone close to them commits suicide and a young woman turns up dead, the case can no longer be so easily ignored by ‘respectable’ society. Layer after layer, Julia and Tennant scrape away the facts of the case like paint from a canvas. What emerges is a somber picture of vice, depravity, and deception stretching from London’s East End to the Far East—with a killer at its center, determined to get away with one last, grisly murder . . .
Comment: Last May I've buddy read the first book in the dr Julia Lewis series and I liked it a lot, as did my friend. Thus, now that the second one has been out for some time, we jumped right into it.
In this second adventure, Julia is asked to help the police again, and in the follow-up she sees herself part of another investigation. A young woman has been found dead but while Tennant and Julia deal with the possible causes, a respected man is found dead, presumably by his own hand, a few days after he had been rescued from an accident on the iced river. His sister and wife are left without an explanation but it all starts point towards the artists who use the type of color used in the mix with the poison which caused the man's death. Then, when all clues point to a possible suspect, that person is murdered. What is going on and how can Julia and Tennant solve the case, especially since many loose threads regarding another case seem to connect somehow with this one?
Once again, I've found this story to be very compelling. The case being investigated is interesting, and even more so when we realize there's more to it than what seemed at first. The most compelling part was precisely how what seemed to be a simple case turned out to be way more complex than what would seem possible.
I think the author did a good job setting up all the elements, along with the social commentary we got used to in the first book, namely all the content regarding woman's rights and place in society and how unfair the laws were to women. It was also clever to suggest the investigation would feature a certain situation and, as layers are peeled, after all there were other things hidden, which led to a more serious case than what seemed at first. The development of the investigation felt very intriguing and engaging and I was quite motivated to learn what was behind everything.
There are, in fact, more details to consider than what seems at first and we learn that the man who committed suicide had some secrets and even those secrets relate to issues that were more complex than what seemed possible. I was quite taken by the police investigation since, obviously, they could not use contemporary tools - some things would have been very easy to discover otherwise - but the deduction process and the clever way to reach some rational conclusions felt particularly well done.
Some elements weren't as fascinating, namely the identity of the murderer. I mean, the why seems simple and isn't, but the way things lead to unravel the person is not very satisfying, as isn't how the story ends. Besides the murderer case, there's also another subject being investigated which brings to light very unfair and even criminal issues, but this isn't fully solved. I can suppose something about this might be referenced in the possible third book, considering the final chapter, but... it's still unacceptable that there isn't a better resolution to some things.
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