A Crimson Warning

By Tasha Alexander (322 pages)

Published by Minotaur Books

Bookish rating: 3.25

What is it about young and well-off (and thus jobless)Victorian widows who meet up with handsome detectives, marry them, and have lots and lots of bedtime romps without ever getting pregnant, despite lack of birth control?

A Crimson Warning is the latest in the Lady Emily mysteries by Tasha Alexander. A couple years ago, I read the first Lady Emily mystery, And Only To Deceive, which I enjoyed. This new one, while good in some parts, never quite delivers.

The good? The dialogue is witty and there is something undeniably appealing about the idea of sipping port in front of the fire in a London drawing room filled with dark woods and hundreds of books, pondering the latest mystery to involve Scotland Yard.

However, Lady Emily herself seems insincere—her concerns about the plight of London’s poor and infirm, and her efforts to promote the vote for women, seem half-baked, as though Alexander herself is uncomfortable with the plain fact that her heroine is a spoiled girl, an intellectual dilettante (really? Emily reduces mystery-related stress by reading The Aeneid in the original Latin?), with lots of wealth and nothing to do but meddle in her husband’s job. And since yoga didn’t yet exist in the higher societal rungs in the 1890s, how else could she fill her days?

Lady Emily’s (second) husband, Colin, is a Scotland Yard detective. He patronizes her, almost to the point of seeming father-like, as though her dabbling in mysteries is slightly eccentric but cute. She always defers to both him and his judgment, but Alexander seems to anticipate that Lady Emily is most definitely a sidekick, so she has him deliver a couple of flat lines that describe their marriage as a “partnership” and he dully exhibits verbal support for suffrage. Yawn. Anyway, we’re supposed to believe that they’re “blissfully” in love, but there’s really nothing about Colin to make him alluring. In short, I didn’t buy it.

The writing is fast-paced to the point of feeling rushed, and the mystery unfolds with countless and clues and lots of running around, but the reader misses what exactly it is that Lady Emily is hunting for. The last 75 pages or so are needlessly cluttered with vying mysteries. Instead of lending credibility to the fact that a real investigation would most likely hit some bumps here and there, which perhaps Alexander was shooting for, the codes and multiple trips to the London Library and British Museum are just . . . confusing. Finally, we end with the motivation for one of the two murders utterly unclear. I read the “confession scene” twice (lordy, what would an author do if a villain just kept his or her mouth shut?), and nope, I couldn’t detect a clear reason for murder #2. Perhaps it’s somewhere else, but methinks fewer loose ends and relatively irrelevant subplots would have made this rather crucial plot point a bit cleaner and more obvious.

Aspects of A Crimson Warning were genuinely enjoyable, as this is a fun time period and the banter among Lady Emily and her peeps is quite amusing and well done. The book is not bad. However, Deanna Raybourn writes a similar type of mystery series (Lady Julia Grey mysteries) with more polished writing and more interesting characters.