The Thirteenth Apostle (Richard Brinsley Sheridan Mysteries)
This is the third mystery in which 18th-century playwright, theatre owner and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan turns detective. The story takes on a dark tone as he finds that homosexual men are being murdered, starting with one of the actors from his own company. Sheridan and his friend the Bow Street Runner Louis-Pierre Nichols are drawn deep into London’s underworld. Blind alleys lead in all directions before at last the killer is found, a man in thrall to his own warped reading of the Bible – the title is a clue, though one that we only understand once the story is nearly over.
There is also a large cast of other characters from Sheridan’s theatre, his family, and politics (including Prime Minister William Pitt, whose life is briefly jeopardized). A journalist, ‘a writer of scurrilous squibs, a purveyor of gossip and defamatory pronouncements, a denizen of the gutter’ is cleverly compared to Mr Snake in A School for Scandal. A subplot concerns how a young man in Sheridan’s extended family may pursue a political career; despite the Whig sympathies of his aunt and Sheridan, he accepts a seat in the Tory interest.
Sheridan’s restless biography, in which careers and even homes were juggled, is well-evoked by the author, as she tells us: ‘He knew he was something of a funambulist … he pictured himself high above a stage swaying on a perilous tightrope.’ However, at times I did feel that the complexity of the cast list was a little ambitious for a book of this length and genre. There are also some time jumps that rather fight against the immediacy of the tale.
Still, with a suspenseful search and then an exciting chase in its last chapters, and some warm good humour despite the crime theme, this is a most entertaining read.
