Fiction readers who crush on blue-blooded British detectives will fall hard for Victorian-era sleuth Charles Lenox, if they haven't already. Lenox first appeared in Charles Finch's well-received 2007 novel "A Beautiful Blue Death."
Lenox's exploits, laid out in 10 subsequent novels, now share shelf space with other aristocratic crime solvers - Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Elizabeth George's Inspector Thomas Lynley, and Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear's private detective who was widow of a viscount. Like these other royal relations, Lenox is independently wealthy and has answered a higher calling to ferret out justice for his fellow citizens.
The latest Lenox novel, "The Vanishing Man," is the second in a series of prequels that offer delicious details into Lenox's early years honing his observational and deductive skills as a private investigator. "The Vanishing Man" takes place in 1853, and Lenox, a passionate, still-inexperienced 26-year-old, has as yet solved only a few cases for Scotland Yard. Filled with self-doubt, he also continues to endure the scorn of the yard's detectives who consider him a nuisance and that of his peers who find sleuthing beneath him.
As the story begins, Lenox is called to the home of the Duke of Dorset, who wants Lenox to discreetly look into the theft of a not-very-valuable painting of one of his ancestors. Lenox soon wonders whether the thief stole the wrong painting, which was hung next to an invaluable one - possibly the only oil painting of William Shakespeare done in his lifetime.
Soon another robbery is attempted, there's a murder and it's revealed that the missing painting may hold a clue to the location of a never-before-seen Shakespeare play. Lenox's hunt for the portrait's thief, the murderer and the missing play take him to the halls of Bedlam hospital and the British Library as well as a pub near London Bridge and the fashionable salons of London's West End.