Fool's Gold

Starred review from June 15, 2015
A crackerjack plot and engaging characters make Peacock’s seventh Liberty Lane mystery (after 2013’s The Path of the Wicked) her best yet. On Sept. 1, 1840, Liberty, a private investigator who has done sleuthing work for high-up government officials, receives a summons from Lady Marguerite Blessington to Gore House, her London mansion. Monsieur Lesparre, one of the plotters involved in a recent failed coup attempt by Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Prince Louis, has taken refuge at Gore House. Lesparre seeks to return to France to provide evidence that will help Prince Louis, but the French government isn’t eager for him to do so. Lady Blessington, alarmed by some odd incidents that suggest an attempt to abduct her secret guest, asks Liberty to make arrangements to smuggle him out of England. The discovery of a corpse at Gore House and the subsequent murder investigation considerably complicate Liberty’s efforts. Peacock (the pen name of Gillian Linscott) makes the political intrigue of the period feel immediate and her stalwart, progressive lead plausible.

January 4, 1999
Given the high standard of many British mysteries published in the U.S., it's a shame that this one lives up to its title. London artist Anabel Gordon grabs the wrong handbag when she flees a fire at a designer sale where a charred body is later found trapped in the loo. Since she, like a few others, attended the event using somebody else's invitation (in her case that of her fashion-magazine editor friend, Abigail Griffith), it's not an easy job to identify the corpse. When, despite her best efforts, Anabel is unable to return the bag and its contents--which include a wad of $100 bills and a false passport--to its owner, Twiggy-like model Kimberley Carter, she takes it with her on a long-planned trip to Italy. There she has a shady commission to paint an exact reproduction of a Whistler portrait. Back in London, Abigail falls victim to a sadistic killer, who evidently confuses her with Anabel. Shocked by the news of her friend's murder, Anabel eventually realizes that the handbag she took contains something far more valuable than cash or a fake passport. While her plot is ingenious, Armstrong (Dead in the Water, etc.) never gets beyond the surface details to imbue her characters with any real individuality. Neither is the author's gratuitous moralizing a substitute for sympathy or wit. The final two chapters, in which Kimberley receives her comeuppance, serve merely as a tawdry coda to this generic mystery.

March 15, 2017
A chance meeting on a Greek island leads to a murder investigation in London.May 1841 finds private investigator Liberty Lane and her husband, Robert Carmichael, anchored off the island of Cephalonia as they honeymoon on a yacht. A dinner invitation from Matthew Vickery introduces them to Father Demetrios, Geoffrey Panter, his beautiful wife, Emilia, and George, a strikingly handsome blind youth Vickery claims is the son of Lord Byron, who famously died of a fever when he came to Greece to fight for independence. Vickery has plans to take George to England in hopes of curing his blindness and introducing him to a society that remembers his womanizing father as -mad, bad, and dangerous to know.- Next morning, George says that Panter, who must have thought he was in trouble during a morning swim, attempted to help him and probably drowned, his body swept out to sea. Robert must immediately go abroad after the Carmichaels return to London, and Liberty is hired by Vickery, whose introduction of George has set all London gossiping. Vickery senses they're being watched. A woman who goes by the name Helena claims to be George's mother. Retreating to the country house Vickery's refurbishing, George begs Liberty to come along with her friend Amos Legge, who gave George riding lessons and is helping Vickery set up his stables. George has both a tutor and a reader, young Scot Hamish McCloud, but remains very restless and tells Liberty that he's cursed. When Helena is found shot dead near the country home, Vickery does his best to cover it up, but it's up to Liberty and her friends to uncover the secrets that just about everyone involved is determined to hide. Peacock (Friends in High Places, 2015, etc.) gives her heroine plenty of scope for investigating a host of suspects, all tied to the enduring mystique of Lord Byron.

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March 6, 2017
Set in 1841, Peacock’s winning eighth Liberty Lane mystery (after 2015’s Friends in High Places) finds the forthright, intelligent, and remarkably ladylike private investigator honeymooning with her husband, Robert Carmichael, on a yacht off the Greek island of Cephalonia, where Lord Byron’s brief stay is still bright in the islanders’ memories. The couple is invited to the villa of a mysterious Englishman, Matthew Vickery, whose household includes breathtakingly handsome 17-year-old Georgios, who is said to be Lord Byron’s illegitimate son. The undercurrents of sexual tension and strife are not lost on Liberty. The next morning a guest at the house is discovered missing and is presumed to have drowned. Was it an accident, suicide, or something even more sinister? The Carmichaels return to London, followed shortly by Vickery and Georgios (now called George). Vickery approaches Liberty to look into some threatening notes that he has received. This sets the intricate plot in full, glorious motion. Fans of Victorian historicals will be enthralled.

May 1, 2017
While honeymooning in the Greek isles, Liberty Lane and her new husband, Robert Carmichael, receive an invitation to dine with fellow British citizen Matthew Vickery at the villa he has rented on Cephalonia. While Liberty enjoys meeting the other members of Vickery's householdincluding a young man named George, who is rumored to be the illegitimate son of Lord Byronthe party ends tragically when another guest of Vickery supposedly drowns. Less than a year later in London, Liberty's path crosses that of Vickery's when he shows up at her residence, intending to hire her services as a private investigator. A woman claiming to be George's mother has been sending Vickery threatening letters, and now Vickery wants Liberty to find out who this mystery lady is and what exactly she wants. Readers who relish impeccably crafted historical mysteries by authors such as Tasha Alexander and Anna Lee Huber will find the eighth book in Peacock's (pseudonym for award-winning Gillian Linscott) Liberty Lane series, following Friends in High Places (2015), to be an especially toothsome literary treat.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)