Why Kings Confess

Starred review from January 20, 2014
The past casts a long shadow in Harris’s best Regency whodunit yet, the eighth after 2013’s What Darkness Brings. In January 1813, a case comes to aristocratic sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr, estranged son of the Earl of Hendon, Chancellor of the Exchequer, from his closest friend, Dr. Paul Gibson. On an East London street, Gibson stumbled across a grisly scene—a woman seriously wounded near the butchered corpse of a French physician, Damion Pelletan, whose heart was removed. The murder and assault coincide with a possible turning point in Anglo-Franco relations. The English are considering making peace with Napoleon, a prospect that does not sit well with the French royalists in exile. The powers that be, including St. Cyr’s überpowerful father-in-law, Lord Jarvis, who’s a cousin of the king, attribute the Pelletan murder to a footpad, but the investigator finds that theory unpersuasive, especially after learning the mutilation has resonance for survivors of the Terror who remember that the Dauphine’s heart was removed in an autopsy. Harris melds mystery and history as seamlessly as she integrates developments in her lead’s personal life into the plot. Agent: Helen Breitwieser, Cornerstone Literary.

February 1, 2014
In Harris' (What Darkness Brings, 2013, etc.) ninth Regency adventure featuring Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin seeks the murderer of a French physician. When surgeon Paul Gibson finds Damion Pelletan's body in a seedy section of London, he's horrified to see that someone has cut out Pelletan's heart. The dead man's companion, Alexandrie Sauvage, is also a physician, but her extended swoon makes her little help in the investigation Gibson launches with his friend Sebastian St. Cyr. The two are an unlikely combination: Gibson is a one-legged, opium-addicted son of poor Irish Catholics, and St. Cyr is Viscount Devlin, the Earl of Hendon's heir. But they both once wore the king's colors, and as civilian comrades, they spare no effort to find the murderer. Pelletan was the personal physician of a diplomat who, it's rumored, is part of a delegation to negotiate peace between Napoleon and the prince regent. The failure of this plan, however, would seriously benefit certain parties, including a wealthy Scots arms dealer and the Bourbons in exile in England. Devlin is also suspicious of the motives of his ruthless father-in-law, cousin to the prince regent and the real power behind the throne. While Devlin tries to make sense of the connection between Pelletan and the French royal family, he worries about his beloved social-activist wife, Hero, who is nine months pregnant and facing a difficult delivery. The person who can best help her is Alexandrie Sauvage--and she's vowed to kill Devlin. This grab bag of cross-dressing royalty, progressive women, missing heirs and international intrigue is laden with modern overtones and teasing hints from previous installments. Devlin's love for his heroic wife is the book's saving element, just as she is the saving of him.

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March 1, 2014

Intrigue complicates the Viscount's life when a French couple sent by Napoleon on a secret peace mission fall prey to those of the opposite persuasion. The Regency-era investigator is on his ninth thrilling case (after What Darkness Brings).

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2014
The grisly murder of French physician Damion Pelletanfound with his heart removed in a disreputable London neighborhood in 1813is a puzzle that Sebastian St. Cyr finds increasingly intriguing. Palletan, recently arrived in London as part of a secret mission seeking peace between England and France, is the son of the doctor who briefly attended the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, during the boy's imprisonment after the revolution, and later autopsied the boy, removing and keeping his heart. Pelletan's sister, the physician Alexi Sauvage, badly injured while accompanying her brother when he was killed, is being stalked by the vengeful relative of a former patient. Solving the murder becomes secondary to St. Cyr's concern for his beloved wife, Hero, as her delivery date approaches with the probability of a breech birth, which both mother and child rarely survived in the early nineteenth century. And although Sauvage is an accomplished accoucheur, St. Cyr's history with her prevents his trusting her with treating Hero. This ninth St. Cyr outing offers a winning combination of the political and the personal with a tangled plot deftly handled in Harris' trademark brisk prose. A compellingly readable addition to a solidly researched historical mystery series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)