A Terribly Nasty Business

Beatrice Steele has solved her first murder, and she has left the manners-obsessed community of Swampshire for London to make a career of it. Her chaperone, Miss Bolton, comes along. They settle in Sweetbriar, a neighborhood close to the Sweet Majestic theater and its pleasure gardens, and also home to a plague of flying squirrels.

Beatrice's favorite thing about the district is DS Investigations, the office she has opened with Inspector Drake, who is prickly and annoyingly logical. The business is not going as planned. Sir Huxley, a famed gentleman inspector and Beatrice's former crush, is still treated as London's real investigator, so the pair are left with lost pets and missing spectacles.

Her mother adds pressure of another kind. The family faces destitution unless Beatrice finds a rich, eligible husband, and she is stretched between that demand and her work. Doubts about whether a city of false promises will ever accept her as a true detective begin to set in.

Then a string of murders pulls Beatrice and Drake into a scandal that sets the neighborhood's wealthiest residents against the arts community, and fear spreads across the city. Their search leads through ballrooms, hidden shops and strange operas, and puts their partnership, their business and Beatrice's standing in society at risk.

This is a historical mystery and the follow-up to A Most Agreeable Murder. It is comic in tone, with wit and a lively pace.