January 25, 2021
In Cutler’s unremarkable sequel to 2019’s The Wages of Sin, Victorian land agent Matthew Rowsley, who serves Lord Croft in the Shropshire village of Thorncroft, creates a board of trustees to look after current and long-term estate needs, as the nobleman is incapacitated due to mental illness. The board includes Rowsley’s wife, Harriet, a former housekeeper, and the longtime Croft family butler, Samuel Bowman. The group has authorized construction of new homes for the estate’s workers, a project disrupted when human remains from Roman times are unearthed. Meanwhile, Bowman is savagely attacked by an unknown assailant. The violence coincides with the arrival from Australia of a stranger who claims to be Croft’s cousin and heir, and who wastes no time acting as if he’s already the new Lord Croft. Rowsley’s sleuthing is nothing special, and Cutler does little to depict class tensions or the political background of the period. Readers content with the same-old-same-old may be entertained. Agent: Sara Menguc, Sara Menguc Literary (U.K.).
December 15, 2020
Dastardly doings at an English manor house. For reasons that are never entirely clear, some of the servants at Thorncroft House, Lord Croft's estate, have been named trustees of the place, along with the capital-F Family's solicitor, the local doctor, the vicar, and several other prominent villagers. The Family wing has been converted into an asylum, although it's never quite clear which members of the Family are being housed there or why. The trustees are also in charge of a large-scale project renovating the villagers' dwellings to give them more room, better sanitation, and such other improvements as the villagers themselves propose. It all comes to a screeching halt when some Roman ruins are found beneath the excavation and then one of the trustees is found lying in a construction pit. Former butler Samuel Bowman isn't dead, but he's gravely injured, so former housekeeper Harriet Rowsley and her husband, Matthew, who seem to be first among equals in the world of the trustees, bring him back to Thorncroft House to convalesce under the watchful eyes of Nurse Pegg. Meanwhile, Lord Croft's second cousin and heir, Julius Trescothick, arrives and ruffles everyone's feathers by treating the servants as servants. As the trustees plot to relieve themselves of the disagreeable heir, a housemaid discovers that someone's been pilfering artwork from the storage room upstairs. More trustees are assaulted, the villagers protest the work stoppage, and Trescothick ups the ante by refusing to dine with anyone who doesn't refuse to dine with him. Nobody dies, but it takes a village, quite literally, to put things right upstairs, downstairs, inside out.
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February 1, 2021
Thorncroft Estate in Shropshire, England, has taken some hits in recent years, first from an unscrupulous land agent, and now because Lord Croft suffers from mental illness. The trustees gather to ensure that the long-term needs of the estate are met. One of the trustees, Matthew Rowsley, is now the land agent, and his wife and fellow trustee, Harriet, has been housekeeper for years. The estate is in an uproar even before the putative heir arrives from Australia. Men breaking ground for new tenant cottages uncover what could be Roman ruins on the estate, and a butler is beaten almost to death. Matthew and Harriet step in to investigate. Is the man who arrives actually the heir? The tenants wonder about their future, as all progress ceases because of the archeological findings. Then, another butler is attacked away from the estate. Harriet and Matthew must match wits with an unscrupulous, violent criminal. VERDICT Book two in this series is a slow-paced, old-fashioned account of estate life in Victorian England. The mystery takes second place to the social commentary about education, social conditions, and class. Only for those interested in the living conditions in late-1800s England.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN
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