An Impossible Impostor

An Impossible Impostor (2022) Deanna Raybourn (Veronica Speedwell)

Set in England in 1900.

Victoria and Stoker are back in London, when Sir Hugo comes to them to ask a favor: check on his goddaughter, and see if the man is her brother, returned from the dead.

He is asking Veronica, because before he was lost to the volcanic explosion, he and Veronica had been friends and associates. And he’s sending them under the excuse of viewing items for the Rosemorran museum.

“The Tasmanian tiger?” I asked. “I thought they were near to extinction.”

“They are,” Stoker said, his color high. “It is the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world.”

The grandmother in the house they were staying at had spent years in India, and unlike many other books dealing with the British Empire, it doesn’t hide the many many issues that eventually lead to Indian independence.

“The Indians were grateful to us, you understand, Miss Speedwell. We brought roads and medicine and education. We showed them how to live.”

I resisted the tart rebuttals that came to mind and began to count to one hundred as she carried on.

“It is all quite different now, of course. The mutiny saw to that.” I realized with a start that she was speaking of the Sepoy Mutiny.

Or the portrayal of the British nobility.

“I do not like the way he speaks to his sister and I certainly do not like the way he speaks of his grandmother’s companion— Anjali, I believe he said. He talks of her as though she were some useful thing to be loaned— a book or a horse.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Stoker said absently. “That sort of man would never loan a horse.”

I really am enjoying this series.

Publisher: Berkley

Rating: 8/10

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