A burial at sea

Charles Finch

Book - 2011

In 1873, retired detective and current Member of Parliament Charles Lenox sets sail on a clandestine mission for the government involving a string of English spy murders pertaining to the newly dug Suez Canal.

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MYSTERY/Finch, Charles
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Subjects
Genres
Detective and mystery fiction
Historical fiction
Spy fiction
Published
New York : Minotaur Books 2011.
Language
English
Main Author
Charles Finch (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
viii, 310 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781250008145
9780312625085
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

Nobody knows a man better than his ex-wife. So Moe Prager's ex-wife, Carmella, is wise to this veteran private eye, accepting the fact that no matter how many times he marries, his first love will always be Brooklyn. "When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk," she tells him in HURT MACHINE (Tyrus, $24.95; paper, $15.95), Reed Farrel Coleman's latest book in a series heavily saturated with local color. Since Prager has recently been told he has stomach cancer, that day may come sooner than Carmella thinks. But this stubborn old shamus is determined to do two things before his ashes are consigned to the sands of Coney Island: Attend his daughter's wedding, and find the person who murdered Carmella's older sister, Alta. Alta Conseco and Maya Watson, emergency medical technicians with the New York Fire Department, became pariahs after walking away from a dying man who was stricken at a trendy Manhattan bistro. Although Alta's death was clearly a retribution killing, her fellow E.M.T. (surely the murderer's next target) refuses to offer any explanation for their behavior. This silent treatment forces Prager to do exactly what we want him to do: Travel the length and breadth of the city talking to cops, firemen, gangsters and restaurateurs in their picturesque natural habitats. The Gelato Grotto in Gravesend is the kind of establishment that would welcome any and all looking for a place to die of their stab wounds. "The violence is one of the things that made this place a legend," according to the current owner, "It's sick, but it's business." Finbarr McPhee's Brass Pole, an Irish tavern near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, is a magnet for firemen, and there's a bar in the Forest Hills section of Queens where half the customers are working cops. Prager even knows an Italian restaurant in Bay Ridge where a man might share a meal ("cold antipasto plate, eggplant parm, veal parm, a big dish of ziti with red sauce") with a mobster. Just don't expect this grizzled Brooklyn native to get decent intel from any of the staff at the High Line Bistro, where the two E.M.T.'s left a dying man flopping on the kitchen floor. "Not to judge," but Prager has a hard time picturing these working stiffs tucking into a lunch of "Thai duck confit with tamarind and pomegranate drizzle." For someone who reads people by the places they eat, drink and make merry, that's good enough to make Prager postpone his death until he solves this case. It might not be "The Voyage of the Beagle," but Charles Finch's latest Victorian mystery, A BURIAL AT SEA (Minotaur, $24.99), is a rousing nautical adventure, set on an English ship awash with murders, storms and the threat of mutiny on its journey to Egypt. Charles Lenox, the gentleman sleuth in this beguiling series, had resigned himself to giving up his raffish avocation after becoming a married man and a junior member of Parliament. But in the winter of 1873, at the request of the prime minister, Lenox takes on the dangerous double mission of negotiating for British rights to the Suez Canal while secretly gathering information about French plans for war. Although the onshore bustle at Plymouth Harbor and Port Said is eye-catching, it pales beside the thrilling scenes at sea aboard the Lucy, a trim corvette outfitted for speed and agility. When one of the ship's officers is murdered in a singularly grotesque manner, the investigation becomes a baffling locked-room whodunit with the entire crew as suspects. An expeditious resolution may be critical for the sake of the ship's morale, but Finch's descriptions of life at sea are so fascinating it's a shame Lenox must bring this case to an end. You have to marvel at a woman who snubs the good Samaritan who pulled her from a train wreck, dealt with the ski pole embedded in her thigh and carried her to safety through a blizzard in the mountains 1,222 meters above sea level - and then demands that her savior go back into the storm for her wheelchair. That's how Anne Holt introduces Hanne Wilhelmsen in 1222 (Scribner, $25), the first novel featuring this prickly Norwegian heroine to be translated (by Marlaine Delargy) into English. There's nothing personal about Hanne's tactless behavior. She's also dismissive of the doctor tending her wounds and scornful of the priest who tries to comfort the survivors waiting out the storm in a rundown hotel. But when the priest is shot, this former cop finds herself drawn into a good old-fashioned murder mystery. Wherever Hanne shows up next, my advice is to follow that wheelchair. The assassin who calls himself Columbus and plies his trade in a devastatingly cool series by Derek Haas is back in DARK MEN (Pegasus Crime, $25), only this time he's not alone. Narrating in his usual dry way, this professional killer explains how he was lured out of foreign retirement and back to Chicago with his Italian lover, Risina. Someone has kidnapped his old "fence" (the contractor who sets up the kills), and Columbus is the only "bagman" (the hired gun who executes them) capable of bringing him back alive. Columbus fancies himself a force of nature - even in slumber "the tiger is still a tiger" - and he's thrilled when Risina shows an aptitude for his line of work. But this preening narcissist is also a consummate craftsman, and it's a pleasure to watch him go up against an adversary with a modus operandi even more diabolical than his own. The Gelato Grotto would welcome any and all looking for a place to die of their stab wounds.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 25, 2012]

CHAPTER ONE     He gazed out at the sunfall from an open second-floor window, breathing deeply of the cool salt air, and felt it was the first calm moment he had known in days. Between the outfitting, the packing, the political conversations with his brother, and a succession of formal meals that had served as shipboard introductions to the officers of the Lucy , his week in Plymouth had been a daze of action and information. Now, though, Charles Lenox could be still for a moment. As he looked out over the maze of thin streets that crossed the short path to the harbor, and then over the gray, calm water itself--smudged brown with half-a-dozen large ships and any number of small craft--he bent forward slightly over the hip-high window rail, hands in pockets. He was past forty now, forty-two, and his frame, always thin and strong, had started to fill out some at the waist. His trim brown hair, however, was still untouched by gray. On his face was a slight, careworn smile, matched by his tired, happy, and curious hazel eyes. He had been for much of his life a detective, more lately a member of Parliament for the district of Stirrington, and now for the first time, he would be something else: something very like a diplomat. Or even a spy. It had begun two months before, in early March. Lenox had been at home on Hampden Lane. This was the small street just off Grosvenor Square, lined with pleasant houses and innocuous shops--a bookseller, a tobacconist--where he had lived nearly his whole adult life. For much of that time his best friend had lived next door to him, a widow named Lady Jane Grey whose family was also from Sussex: they had grown up riding together, fidgeting through church together: together. Just three years before, to his own confused and happy surprise, Lenox had realized how very much he loved her. It had taken some time to gather the courage to ask her to marry him. But he had. Now, in the winter of 1873, they were just getting used to the upside-down tumble their lives had taken. Their houses, side by side as they were, had been rebuilt to connect, and now they lived within a sprawling mishmash of rooms that matched their joined-up lives. They were a couple. Lenox had been in his study that evening in March, making notes for a speech he hoped to give the following day in the House of Commons about India. There was a gentle snow outside the high windows near his desk, and the gaslights cast a dim and romantic light over the white, freshened streets. There was a knock at the door. Lenox put down his pen and flexed his sore hand, opening and closing it, as he waited for their butler, Kirk, to show the guest in. "Sir Edmund Lenox," Kirk announced, and to his delight Charles saw his older brother's cheerful and ruddy face pop around the doorway. "Ed!" he said, and stood. They clasped hands. "Come, sit by the fire--you must be nigh on frozen. Well, it's been two weeks nearly, hasn't it? You're in the country too often for my taste, I tell you that frankly." Edmund smiled widely but he looked exhausted. "In fact I wasn't at the house, so you can't lay that charge against me," he said. The house being the one they had grown up in together, Lenox House. "No? But you said you were going to see Molly and the--" The baronet waved a hand. "Security reasons, they say, but whatever it is we were at Lord Axmouth's place in Kent, five of us, holed up with the admiralty, the chaps from the army, a rotating cast of ministers ... with Gladstone." The prime minister. Charles furrowed his brow. "What can it have been about?" In person Edmund Lenox looked very much like his younger brother, but he was perhaps less shrewd in the eyes, more open-faced. He served in Parliament out of a sense, not of ambition, but of duty, inherited from their father, and indeed preferred the country to London. Perhaps as a result he had a countryish air. He seemed heartier than his brother Charles. This innocent, candid mien, however, concealed a more intelligent mind than one might immediately have suspected. It had been to Lenox's great shock when he first learned, five or six years before, that Edmund wasn't the stolid backbencher he had always appeared to be, but in fact a leading member of his party who had declined important posts again and again, preferring to work behind the scenes. Now he surprised Charles again. "You know something of my purview?" Edmund said. "Something." Lenox himself was still a backbencher, but could say without undue immodesty that he was a rising man; long hours of work had seen to that. "You advise the ministers, consult with the prime minister on occasion, find votes--that sort of thing." Edmund smiled again, an unhappy smile this time. "First of all, let me say that I come to ask a favor. I hope you'll agree to do it." "With all my heart." "Not so quickly, for love's sake, Charles." "Well?" Edmund sighed and stood up from the armchair, staring for a moment at the low, crackling glow in the hearth. "Might I have a drink?" he asked. "The usual?" Lenox stood and walked over to a small, square, lacquered table crowded with crystal decanters. He poured them each a glass of Scotch whisky. "Here you are." "There are other parts of my job, that I haven't mentioned to you before," said Edmund after a sip. "A role I play that you might call more--more secret." Lenox understood instantly, and felt well inside him some mixture of excitement, tension, surprise, and even a slight hurt that he hadn't heard of this before. "Intelligence?" he said gravely. "Yes." "What branch?" Edmund considered the question. "You might call me an overseer, of sorts." "All of it, then." "Since the new prime minister came in, yes. I report to him. These weeks we have been--" "You might have told me," said Charles, his tone full of forced jocularity. With comprehension in his eyes Edmund said, "I would have, believe me--I would have come to you first were I permitted to speak of it." "And why can you now? This favor?" "Yes." "Well?" "It's France," said Edmund. "We're worried about France." "That doesn't make sense. Everything has been cordial, hasn't it? Uneasily so, I suppose, but--" Edmund sat down. "Charles," he said with a hard look, "will you go to Egypt for us?" Taken aback, Charles returned his brother's stare. "Why--I suppose I could," he said at last. "If you needed me to." So that spark had burst into this conflagration; Lenox would set sail twelve hours from now aboard the Lucy , a corvette bound for the Suez. A cool breeze fluttered the thin white curtains on either side of him. He felt his nerves shake slightly, his stomach tighten, as he contemplated the idea of leaving, of all his fresh responsibility. This Plymouth house--a cream-colored old Georgian in a row, let by the week or month to officers and their families--had in just two weeks come to feel almost like home, and he realized with a feeling of surprise that he would be sorry to leave it, even though he had looked forward to nothing else for two months but his voyage. Then he understood that it wasn't the house he would miss, but the home that his wife had made of it. He heard the door open downstairs. "Charles?" a voice rang from the bottom of the stairs. It was Lady Jane. Before he answered he hesitated for a brief moment and looked out again at Plymouth Harbor, under its falling golden sun, savoring the idea, every boy's dream, of being out at sea. "Up here!" he cried then. "Let me give you a hand." But she was clambering up the stairs. "Nonsense! I'm already halfway there." She came in, pink-faced, dark-haired, smallish, pretty in a rather plain way, dressed all in blue and gray--and holding her belly, which, though her dress hid it, had begun to round out. For after hesitation and dispute, something wonderful had happened to them, that daily miracle of the world that nevertheless always manages to catch us off guard, no matter our planning, no matter our dreams, no matter our circumstances: she was pregnant.   Copyright (c) 2011 by Charles Finch Excerpted from A Burial at Sea by Charles Finch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.