A Beautiful Blue Death

A Beautiful Blue Death (2007) Charles Finch

A Beautiful Blue Death has come up for awhile now as a recommended book for me, and there is good reason for that: I love historical mysteries.

Charles Lenox is a gentleman who likes to dabble in the investigation of crimes. Being a gentleman, he has the time and the wealth to dabble as he pleases. His neighbor, Lady Jane Grey, asks him to investigate the death of her former maid who had gone into the service of George Barnard to be closer to her fiance, who was a footman at Barnard’s house. Barnard wants Lenox to have nothing to do with the investigation, which makes the investigation rather more difficult.

One of the things I love about historical mysteries is when they’re done well they transport me to another place and time. I’m not foolish enough to believe I would want to live in such a place and time–I like indoor plumbing and the right to vote–but the past is an interesting place to visit.

But I’m still not quite sure how I feel about Charles Lenox and A Beautiful Blue Death. Lenox is a dabbler and a man of leisure, which is how he can afford to investigate crime as a hobby. He also has some ideals that seem far more modern than seems likely for the Victorian era and a man of his class. Not that there weren’t people at that time who held what I would consider to be modern ideals, I just find it strange that historical mysteries are simply littered with open minded men and women. And of course the dislikable characters are those who actually hold the more that were common at the time.

Like I said, I enjoy living in modern times, but it seems to be that Victorian England of historical mysteries is populated with free thinking men and women who were far ahead of their times.

That’s not to say that Lenox is a complete outlier and would have been seen as an outcast rather than a gentleman, it’s simply that as a whole the attitudes of the characters felt far more modern than Victorian.

So how was the mystery? It wasn’t bad. I did like that Lenox was challenged in his ability to investigate the murder, but there was nothing that leaped out of the pages at me and pulled me in to the point where I was totally immersed in the story.

That doesn’t make this a bad book–and it isn’t a bad book. It’s just that for an Agatha Aware Nominee, I was expecting more.

On the other hand, I’m thinking Grandmom will love this book, so there is that.
Rating: 6/10

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