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The Ambassador's Lost Letters

Book 4 in Miss Temperance Vane, Enquiries

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by Beatrice Marlowe

Miss Temperance Vane is not in the habit of taking instructions from foreign governments. As an enquiry agent of some reputation in Edwardian London, she prefers her clients domestic, her cases tidy, and her mornings free for proper tea. But when the Grand Duchy of Vasmark comes calling with a diplomatic crisis and a very generous retainer, discretion wins out over principle — particularly because the missing items are compromising letters capable of setting off an international incident of the sort that ends careers and starts wars. Book four of the Miss Temperance Vane, Enquiries series opens at 12 Gower Street on a grey morning in 1904, where an unnamed gentleman arrives at her door and a rather grand ambassador explains exactly how much trouble his embassy is in. The trail leads from a suspiciously empty safe to a Whitehall-trained cat with impeccable credentials, a forger of unsettling talent working the London black market, and a press corps already sharpening their pencils for the scandal of the season. Two governments want what Temperance is holding, and neither of them is telling the whole truth. For readers who love the plotting of Agatha Christie served with the tone of P. G. Wodehouse, this is a charmingly British, delightfully deadly stand-alone mystery. The case resolves fully on the final page, with every clue laid fairly and every thread tied off — no cliffhangers, no loose ends, just the deep satisfaction of a puzzle solved by a heroine worth following for decades. Temperance Vane investigates because she is very good at it, because the police are politely otherwise occupied, and because the people who come to her door tend to deserve whatever they get. Her London is lived-in rather than lectured about: the clothes, the manners, the delicious social tension of a woman doing things she was not, strictly speaking, supposed to do. Fans of the Violet Carlyle Mysteries, the Duchess of Stortford series, and other witty historical mysteries will find a new enquiry agent to add to their must-binge list.