Silver Murder

Description

Kensington is the kind of town where everybody’s business is everybody’s business, and Agnes Fane has always rather liked it that way.

As the newest undertaker at Pinkerton’s, the family business she inherited as her father’s health began to fail, Agnes spends her days making the dead look like themselves again: a favourite brooch pinned just so, a stubborn curl coaxed back into place. It’s steady work, if not exactly what The Ladies of Kensington had in mind for a well-bred young war nurse recently returned from four years patching up soldiers rather closer to the front lines than anyone in town would like to imagine.

Then Camillo Rosser is murdered.

Kensington’s beloved barber, a man who could talk a confession out of anyone in the time it took to trim their sideburns, is found in his own shop, his face and hands painted an eerie, deliberate silver. The official story, robbery gone wrong, doesn’t sit right with Agnes for a moment. Camillo was her friend. He deserves better than a lazy explanation and a closed file.

So Agnes starts asking questions. Kensington’s chief inspector would very much prefer she didn’t, but Agnes has never much cared what a man in a uniform preferred, and she has one significant advantage he doesn’t: people talk to undertakers the way they don’t talk to police. Every secret, every grudge, every whispered rumour eventually finds its way to Pinkerton’s front parlour, and Agnes has spent a lifetime learning how to listen.

She isn’t alone for long. Dr Syril Reitz, Kensington’s new and painfully reserved doctor, is drawn reluctantly into her investigation, appalled by her methods and even more appalled to discover he can’t quite stay away from them. Where Agnes leaps, Syril hesitates, checks his facts, and follows anyway, and between her instincts and his caution, the two of them begin to piece together a picture far more complicated, and far more personal, than a simple robbery.

The trail leads through a beauty salon dripping in gossip and violet perfume, a grieving woman’s cottage heavy with mourning cloth, a bitter rift between two once-close Italian families, and the shadow of Kensington’s wealthiest, most respected citizen, a man whose generosity has bought him rather more silence than anyone realises. Somewhere among the barbershop banter, the family feuds, and the secrets Camillo carried behind his easy smile is the reason he died, and the reason someone worked so hard to make his death look like something else entirely.

Silver Murder is the first novel in the Kensington Mysteries, a warm, witty, character-driven series set against the vivid, underexplored backdrop of post-World War II South Africa. Fans of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and classic Golden Age whodunits will find a heroine after their own heart in Agnes Fane: glamorous where the occasion calls for solemnity, fearless where caution would be easier, and utterly unwilling to let a friend’s murder go unanswered simply because the truth might prove inconvenient for powerful people.

Grief and humour sit side by side in Kensington, much like they do in life, and Agnes Fane wouldn’t have it any other way.

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