The Cunning House

Starred review from September 14, 2015
Turley (Keats’s Boyish Imagination) makes his fiction debut with a superior whodunit inspired by a major sex scandal of the Regency era—the 1810 raid on London’s White Horse Tavern, which led to the arrests of a number of men on sodomy charges. Junior Prosecutor Christopher Wyre, who has been handling such cases, finds himself investigating another shocking crime. The Duke of Cumberland, one of the four men ruling the country, narrowly escapes death after being attacked one night in his bedroom. The assailant appears to have been one of the duke’s valets, Salis, who was found in his locked room, an apparent suicide. Troubled by the official story, Wyre believes that there’s more going on than has been revealed, a position that places his life in jeopardy. Turley combines a gritty look at the times with a carefully constructed murder mystery that resolves itself in a way that may even surprise genre veterans. Agent: Dominique Baxter, David Higham Associates.