It’s about time I returned to my historical fiction murder mystery roots and picked up another regency era read. Thankfully, Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris arrived on the holds shelf for me and I could not wait to pick it up! This is the 20th novel in the series – yes, you read that right, the 20th Sebastian St. Cyr book – and it is just as good of a read as so many of the others.

August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim—Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent’s boon companions—was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man’s orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian’s life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem. As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes.

History is a favourite subject of mine, incase you didn’t know, and the year with no summer is something I have come across many times. From the setting for Mary Shelley’s inception of Frankenstein to the happenings that challenged the religious thought of the day, further fuelling the science vs. religion battle, the year of no summer is a fascinating and dark (no pun intended) topic. What better time to set a murder mystery tale, especially considering the social and political contexts at the time.

What I really like about these Sebastian St. Cyr novels is that Hero, Sebastian’s wonderful partner of deduction and investigation and a strong force of nature in her own right, often is following up on a social phenomenon in the form of interviews for a regular column, and these interviews are with the impoverished working-class, unemployed beggars, war-torn veterans, and orphaned children of the streets. They are with characters who represent very real, very serious, and very concerning facets of history and social norms, and are the people who often get overlooked unless used as scapegoats for crimes. Who Will Remember does a magnificent job at reminder the reader that these groups are often targeted or left to fend for themselves, and at a time where the world was suffering a major food shortage and crop failure, it is no surprise that many were struggling to make ends meet.

I really like Who Will Remember and I wish I had started reviewing C.S. Harris’ works earlier because they are some of my favourite historical fiction mysteries to read. They are certainly up there with Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane series, as I have previously mentioned in this historical fiction murder mystery series comparison. Forgive me but I won’t be rereading and reviewing the first eighteen books in a series. you will just have to read them for yourselves, but know I highly encourge you to do so as they are vivid, dark, and incredible reads.