Portrait of Peril (Victorian Mystery #5)
Laura Joh Rowland
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars
3.80
· 10 ratings · 304 pages · Published: 12 Jan 2021
Victorian London is a city gripped by belief in the supernatural--but a grisly murder becomes a matter of flesh and blood for intrepid photographer Sarah Bain.
London, October 1890 . Crime scene photographer Sarah Bain is overjoyed to marry her beloved Detective Sergeant Barrett--but the wedding takes a sinister turn when the body of a stabbing victim is discovered in the crypt of the church. Not every newlywed couple begins their marriage with a murder investigation, but Sarah and Barrett, along with their friends Lord Hugh Staunton and Mick O'Reilly, take the case.
The dead man is Charles Firth, whose profession is "spirit photography"-- photographing the ghosts of the deceased. When Sarah develops the photographs he took in the church, she discovers one with a pale, blurred figure attacking the victim. The city's spiritualist community believes the church is haunted and the figure is a ghost. But Sarah is a skeptic, and she and her friends soon learn that the victim had plenty of enemies in the human world--including a scientist who studies supernatural phenomena, his psychic daughter, and an heiress on a campaign to debunk spiritualism and expose fraudulent mediums.
In the tunnels beneath a demolished jail, a ghost-hunting expedition ends with a new murder, and new suspects. While Sarah searches for the truth about both crimes, she travels a dark, twisted path into her own family's sordid history. Her long lost father is the prime suspect in a cold-case murder, and her reunion with him proves that even the most determined skeptic can be haunted by ghosts from the past.
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The 'Victorian Mystery' series
3.70 · 44 ratings
adult · historical · victorian · audiobook · amateur-sleuth · law-enforcement · historical-fiction · fiction · mystery · female-mc · book · industrial-era · crime · murder · thriller · suspense · investigator
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