Two months later, Isabelle Stanton, cousin to Jack Haldean, is traveling by train when she has an encounter with an unpleasant man in a blue bowler hat. She finds the experience unsettling but doesn’t think more of it, until she finds a would-be reporter looking nauseous outside one of the compartments, telling her not to go in and rambling about jewels. The man is inside. Someone stabbed him before shoving his head out the window as the train was passing a bridge, making him almost impossible to identify. And there’s a beautiful sapphire necklace under the seat, one that was just reported stolen. Evidence on the man indicates that he might have been the Vicar, a notorious criminal thought dead, but there’s more to come. Someone tries to kill both Isabelle and the reporter. The various characters gather at Breagan Grange, an estate built next to an anxiety temple with disturbing imagery and a history of human sacrifice. There’s a shady private eye, séances, near-death experiences, and yes, it’s all connected to the murder of Mrs. Paxton.
Blood is another one of Gordon-Smith’s dense and complex mysteries. I admit, she partly lost me this time. This might have been due to my mood while I was reading, but I had a hard time following some of the character relations. I think this could be because Gordon-Smith doesn’t really give the reader much to latch onto. Like in her previous book, the mystery hinges on the dead man’s identity. But we get a lot of discussion about it and not much progress. Is he Sandy Paxton? Some of the items on him could have belonged to Sandy, and they weren’t forged. But were they planted? Is he the still-missing Terence Napier? Is he the Vicar? An accomplice? Gordon-Smith’s other novels feature dense plots with lots of possible avenues, but here it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about the theoretical identities of people we haven’t met. It’s not concrete. Even when we get a quite brutal attempted murder later in the book, we never really sit down and think about who could have done this, why would they do it, etc. The only investigation is based an overheard statement that, while the character would plausibly come to a certain conclusion, the reader is likely to see other explanations.
This is frustrating, because the book is really good otherwise. It’s a book in motion, things are happening and, in spite of my griping, they don’t feel thrown in for the sake of exciting the reader with fluff. Haldean does some good detective work here, digging deeper into the crimes. For example, after Mrs. Paxton was killed, all three of her servants skipped town. Haldean can believe that one, maybe two, would, but why would all three skip town without leaving any information? I like these sorts of mini-mysteries that give the reader something to think about.
Gordon-Smith also toys with the impossible crime here, albeit without committing to it. Mrs. Paxton dies behind the locked door of her bedroom, but her poisoning isn’t treated as a locked room. Later, at Breagan Grange, during a séance, one character has blood suddenly appear on their hands, and they’re later attacked in a cave with a locked door. But again, they aren’t treated as impossible crimes (although the blood trick is pretty neat).
For all my gripes, once everything is wrapped up and Haldean explains everything, this is probably the best-constructed mystery I’ve read from Gordon-Smith. There are more clues, the clues that are there are more plentiful, there’s foreshadowing and set-up for the twists, etc. Some of the clues are only clues because this is a mystery novel and so you know that X is going to be a clue, but this is a minor problem. Once I got over my initial annoyance at the identity games and thought about the solution, I saw that it was pretty solid. I’m noticing certain motifs that the author returns to, so a savvier reader might see the solution coming, but I was fooled and happy to be so.
So, in the end, this is another solid work from one of my favorite modern authors. Again, this is the best mystery I’ve read by her, even if the construction could have been improved. Recommended; this is well worth your time if you like classically-styled mysteries.
