What Remains of Heaven

Written by C.S. Harris
Review by Luan Gaines

Regency London is stunned by the murder of the bishop, Sir Francis Prescott. Responding to the request of his aunt and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the inimitable Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, former spy and military hero, agrees to investigate the shocking murder when yet another body is discovered, this one killed thirty years earlier. Both corpses are found in an ancient burial crypt. St. Cyr learns the murders are tangentially connected with the infamous Hellfire Club, a volatile collection of treasonous letters penned during the American Revolution and dark family secrets that lead directly back to his own bloodline.

Harris is a master of the genre, exploring politics and personal agendas, local unsavory characters benefiting from the tragedies of others, and the carefully wrought facades of noble families riddled with secrets. Bedeviled with personal problems, St. Cyr interviews a plethora of potential suspects. Barely surviving a bloody confrontation, he races against time to a reckoning in the crypt, exposing a murderer, thirty years of deceit and the crooked branches of his own family tree.