Includes a sneak peek of The Woman In the Water, a prequel to the Charles Lenox series. Has the Lieutenant, who had a hand in intelligence, been kidnapped by French operatives? Or is there some more personal grudge at work? The situation grows graver by the hour, and Lenox knows that he will have to work quickly and brilliantly to have any chance of discovering the missing soldierâ?and getting home in time for his own Christmas dinner. Lieutenant Austen, by all accounts an upstanding member of the elite Grenadier Guards, disappears, and his friends, searching the cloakroom of the station where they had been waiting for their trains together, find only a spray of blood on the wall above a scattering of his personal itemsâ?his train ticket among them. > Charles Lenox's holiday preparations are interrupted when an officer vanishes at Charing Cross Station. This review has been updated with corrected agent information.In Gone Before Christmas, this delightfully absorbing short Christmas story in the bestselling Charles Lenox mystery series, Lenox must find a soldier who ran into a cloakroom for his hatâ? and never returned. Still, this entry will please series fans. Finch supplies an extremely clever solution to the murder mystery, but the dynamic between Lenox and his servants can feel more farcical than realistic, and describing the 19th century as the one “in which murder became a real notion” is ill-phrased, at best. The pair deduce that the writer refers to the unsolved strangulation of an unidentified woman found on an island in the Thames, and Lenox uses his family connections to get access to Sir Richard Mayne, the head of Scotland Yard, and a role in the investigation. An anonymous letter-writer to one newspaper boasts of having committed the perfect murder and of his intention to kill a second woman around the first crime’s one-month anniversary. Lenox and Graham, his Bunter-like valet (“who every fifteen days or so let slip a small joke at his employer’s expense”), routinely peruse the papers for crime stories. Set in 1850, Finch’s uneven 11th novel starring aristocratic London sleuth Charles Lenox (after 2016’s The Inheritance) recounts Lenox’s first serious inquiry, undertaken when he was just 23.

The woman in the water by charles finch