A GRAVE ROBBERY by Deanna Raybourn

Book 9 in the Veronica Speedwell Victorian sleuth series, A GRAVE ROBBERY is an exuberant entry in this delightful murder mystery series by my beloved Deanna Raybourn. This book made me cackle out loud constantly from all the witticisms and quirky characters. And I highlighted the bejeebers out of this book, Dear Reader. So many things to adore!!

I love Raybourn’s use of evocative language and large juicy words that are exquisitely right for the setting. It’s often astonishing to me how caught up I am in Raybourn’s stories, even though her characters are all slightly larger than life and clearly ridiculous, but oh-so funny and endearing.

Stoker and Veronica are the perfect foils for one another. Stoker is an aristocrat who claims he just wants to be left alone to pursue his taxidermy, but he always follows Veronica intrepidly into whatever dangerous investigations she drags them into. He’s grumpy and a near-misanthrope, but those he has allowed into his inner circle he cherishes tenderly. Veronica has an outsized opinion of her own capabilities, but it's so cheering to watch her buck the patriarchy and succeed, for the most part. Her outspokenness and flaunting of the sexual mores of her day will please the modern woman.

This time, Veronica and Stoker set out to find the murderer of a young woman who is encased in wax and made to look like a Madame Tussaud figure in a glass coffin. The mystery takes several dizzying dips and swirls unexpectedly, which I reveled in. A GRAVE ROBBERY contains unique characters, a historical setting, and a complex mystery that combine to create a gratifying story I will giddily return to again and again.

Veronica and Stoker discover that not all fairy tales have happy endings, and some end in murder, in this latest historical mystery from New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would do such a dreadful thing, and why?

Sleuthing out the answer to this question sets Veronica and Stoker on their wildest adventure yet. From the underground laboratories of scientists experimenting with electricity to resurrect the dead in the vein of Frankenstein to the traveling show where Stoker once toured as an attraction, the gaslit atmosphere of London in October is the perfect setting for this investigation into the unknown. Through it all, the intrepid pair is always one step behind the latest villain—a man who has killed once and will stop at nothing to recover the body of the woman he loved. Will they unmask him in time to save his next victim? Or will they become the latest figures to be immortalized in his collection of horrors?