Breaking the Circle (A Margaret Murray mystery, 2)
Found face down in her bowl of mulligatawny soup, Muriel Fazakerley is the first medium to meet an untimely death in this second in series, set in 1905, featuring Margaret Murray, famed archaeologist, classical scholar and occasional sleuth. When Evadne Principal is murdered, Margaret decides it’s time to go undercover, taking her pet stuffed owl’s alias as Mrs. Henrietta Plinlimmon, and joining the Bermondsey Spiritualist Circle for a peek inside the early 20th-century world of mediums, seances and “obnoxious bastard” occult investigators. She passes along the information she uncovers to her friend and one-time student, D.S. Andrew Crawford at Scotland Yard. When a third medium is bludgeoned to death, it’s time to bring in the big guns, and retired inspector Edmund Reid (of Ripper fame) is cajoled into playing the renowned medium, Eusapia Palladino, for an invitees-only séance at a society soiree devoted to the supernatural. Lady Sylvia plans to invite 150 guests, and Margaret knows this is “too many [for a séance] by approximately a hundred and forty-one.”
This is a delightful tongue-in-cheek tale and a lot of fun to bury yourself in, with its look-alikes, misdirection, mistaken identities, and the author’s ironic and singular turns of phrase― “Margaret made a note to herself… not to catch this woman’s habit of speaking in Capitals”; “he was hopelessly mired in what had once been a sentence”; “Fry kept his waistcoat fitting to within an inch of its life”. The novel is full of quirky folk with equally quirky names, such as some of the above mentioned, plus Lucinda Twelvetrees, Christina Plunkett, and Daisy Lorne (or is it Lawn). I look forward to the next in series.
