In what promises to be a breakout in Charles Finch’s bestselling series, An Extravagant Death finds Sir Charles Lenox traveling to Gilded Age Newport and New York to investigate the death of a beautiful socialite.

London, 1878. With faith in Scotland Yard shattered after a damning corruption investigation, Charles Lenox’s detective agency is rapidly expanding. The gentleman sleuth has all the work he can handle, two children, and an intriguing new murder case.

But when a letter arrives with an unexpected invitation, he’s unable to resist the call of an old, unfulfilled yearning: to travel to America. Arriving in New York, he begins to receive introductions into both its old Knickerbocker society and its new robber baron splendor. Then, a shock: the suicide of the season’s most beautiful debutante, who has thrown herself from a cliff. Or was it a suicide? Her closest friend doesn’t think so, and Lenox, sacrificing his plans, travels to the family’s magnificent Newport mansion in the guise of an idle English gentleman. What ensues is a fiendsh game of cat and mouse.

Witty, complex, and tender, An Extravagant Death is Charles Finch’s triumphant return to the main storyline of his beloved Charles Lenox series–a devilish mystery, a social drama, and an unforgettable first trip for an Englishman coming to America.

Review:

Dramatic, devious, and engaging!

In this latest novel by Finch, An Extravagant Death, we head back to 1878 and into the life of detective Charles Lenox as he reluctantly heads to America and finds himself acquiring an unforeseen sidekick, Theodore Blaine, and helping in the investigation of a murdered woman found on the beaches of Newport that has a list of suspects that reads like the who’s who of Manhattan royalty.

The prose is intricate and tight. The characters are intelligent, resourceful, and witty. And the plot is a methodical, compelling whodunit full of red herrings, suspects, deduction, deception, corruption, power, secrets, violence, and murder.

An Extravagant Death is the eleventh book in the Charles Lenox Mysteries, and if you enjoy historical mysteries, this novel won’t disappoint. It’s a compelling, intriguing, delightfully entertaining tale by Finch that’s another fantastic addition to this USA Today bestselling series and one I thoroughly enjoyed.

This novel is available now.

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