The Mingo House is an aging, morose museum in Boston's Back Bay area that a handful of concerned citizens are trying to restore to its 19th century glory. But funds are hard to come by, until news of a young woman's dead body being found there dressed in a vintage Victorian gown. Now lots of people are interested in Mingo House, just not for the right reasons.
Could the house be cursed because of its earlier inhabitants' violent history? And is there a stolen treasure still concealed within the walls of the house? It's up to Mark Winslow, one of the trustees of the museum, to get to the bottom of the mystery and the murder.
An entertaining mystery, albeit a bit sluggish at times. Nothing nail-biting or overly exciting in A PINCHBECK BRIDE, but it is an enjoyable cozy mystery.
A young woman in Victorian finery is found strangled in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a nineteenth- century time capsule in Boston’s Back Bay. Dubbed the “Victorian Girl” by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation — and a darkness reaching back to the Mingoes’ roots in England and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife. Boston comic Mark Winslow and the other trustees of Mingo House are divided as to whether the place is sustainable as a museum. Trustee chairman Rudy Schmitz, the brash entrepreneur, seems convinced that the porous roof and escalating rain damage will doom the place. Nadia Gulbenkian, the last of the old guard trustees, is accusing Rudy of engineering the museum’s demise. Software executive Jon Kim and a dubious collector of saints’ bones and art are pursuing their own clandestine agendas. Mingo House itself seems cursed, for its origins in bullets and cannonballs and the family’s reputation as regicides in the execution of King Charles I. A number of people believe its walls conceal treasure, a stolen royal monstrance, and are willing to do anything to retrieve it. In this sequel to The Fisher Boy, pierced college students clash with flawed Brahmin bluebloods, and the Gothic with the high-tech. As the deaths and threats multiply, one question resounds: which will survive this summer of rain, of deluge — Mingo House or its terrified staff?
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