The Opium Purge (Lady Fan Mystery)
Ottillia Fanshawe, called “Lady Fan,” is the wife of Lord Francis Fanshawe and an amateur detective in England of 1790. While visiting her mother-in-law, Ottilia encounters Tamasine Roy, a strikingly beautiful young woman who displays a kind of child-like madness. After Tamasine announces that she has killed her guardian, Sir Joslin Cadel, Ottilia sets out to discover the truth about the man’s death. Third in a series, The Opium Purge is a tightly-paced parlor room mystery whose main action occurs in the Fanshawe house and across the way at Sir Joslin’s Willow Court, but the novel also pulls in a backstory set in the British imperial Caribbean. Bailey allows Tamasine’s condition to remain as compellingly imprecise as the social attitudes and medical knowledge of the time period allow.
As seems typical of mysteries, Ottilia’s major development as a character involves gaining knowledge, and I thought Bailey balanced the social constraints on a woman in this era with Ottilia’s talent at fact-gathering and deduction very well. The details of the past scandals connected to Ottilia’s in-laws are a distraction in the first chapters, but that confusing and ultimately irrelevant material is the novel’s only real flaw.
An intriguing look at the manners of Georgian England, The Opium Purge is a cozy read recommended for fans of historical mystery.
