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After Absent Friends, which won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award in 2000, admirers of the series were wondering whether its suffragette heroine, Nell Bray, would retire now that the war was over and the vote won. Happily, Linscott has found a way to keep Nell going, not into 1920's, which she would clearly have found depressing, but back in time to before the war. For those unfamiliar with the series, there are nine books featuring Nell, a radical suffragette, follower of Mrs Pankhurst, battling for the vote and solving murders along the way. It is a series that has improved much with time and by now, Linscott has developed a pitch-perfect sense for the period. Linscott knows very well that the public mood and the collective spirits of the suffragettes were very different in, say, 1910 than 1914, and that in the last weeks before the War broke out in 1914, suffrage militants were very desperate indeed. As the book opens, Nell discovers the body of her cousinžs child, Verona, the perfect daughter of the title,.an apparent suicide. Worse, it will shortly appear that not only was she pregnant but also was a morphine addict. How could a nineteen-year-old go so wrong in a matter of months? The family blames Nellžs influence, since Verona had also been hanging around some of the same radical movements that Nell supports and Nell feels some guilt for not having taken a little more care of her second cousin. So she sets about trying to find out what happened to Verona, a quest that will involve her with the secret service and a spy plot worthy of a Conrad novel. Like Absent Friends, this is a rather darker novel than the first few in the series, which reflected the high spirits and sense of personal liberation of the early suffrage movement. A particular Archduke is assassinated toward the end of the book and we, if not Nell, who expects a war with Ireland, know what lies ahead. Though sober, it remains as entertaining and absorbing as the earlier books. Anyone who likes straight historical crime fiction without the romance (and there arenžt many books in that category) or anyone interested in the militant womenžs movement will find Nell hard to resist. This review refers to the Time Warner paperback edition, available in the UK and in Canada but not, alas, in the US, where Linscott no longer appears.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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