WHERE SERPENTS SLEEP, fourth helping of chocolate-coated crack in mystery novel form

WHERE SERPENTS SLEEP
C.S. HARRIS
Berkley Books
$8.99 mass market or Kindle editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: London, 1812. The brutal slaughter of eight young prostitutes in a house of refuge near Covent Garden leaves only one survivor- and one witness: Hero Jarvis, reform-minded daughter of the Prince Regent's cousin, Lord Jarvis. When the Machiavellian powerbroker quashes any official inquiry that might reveal his daughter's unorthodox presence, Hero launches an investigation of her own and turns to Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help.

Working in an uneasy alliance, Hero and Sebastian follow a trail of clues leading from the seedy brothels and docksides of London's East End to the Mayfair mansions of a noble family with dark secrets to hide. Risking both their lives and their reputations, the two must race against time to stop a killer whose ominous plot threatens to shake the nation to its very core.

My Review: ADDICTIVE SERIES ADVISORY!
As much incoherent gabbling as I did at the end of my review for WHY MERMAIDS SING, I had no way to know that Miss C.S. Harris had a nitro-fueled bullet-shaped moon rocket of a reveal in this book that would ratchet up the stakes for the entire series from here on.

It's a doozy, believe me, and it's also just too much fun and too exciting to imagine how book five will be handling this situation for you not to start NOW getting these books. The series is 11 books old now, I think, so we know we're not getting left in the lurch with no closure. (I hate that! It's why I only watch TV series on Prime, Netflix, and Acorn these days.)

As Sebastian is grieving the BIG Reveal from last book and the havoc it has wreaked on his mind, heart, and soul, he stops caring...or numbs it, anyway...about people in trouble, so stops investigating crimes. It takes his annoying Nemesis, Miss Hero Jarvis who is the daughter of England's most powerful man, to wake Sebastian up and bring out his sense of the rightness of spending his time righting wrongs for those otherwise too weak to expect help.

Miss Jarvis, meanwhile, is caught up in an obsessive need to discover the truth behind a series of murders that shake her to her core. In her efforts to make the world a better place, Hero has decided to research and write a bill to go before Parliament that will offer help to impoverished women, thus reducing the enormous supply of prostitutes in London. Speaking with these unfortunate women and girls, Hero finds herself learning more than is desirable for a gently born woman. But she found, and then watched murdered, a younger woman from exactly her class in a rehabilitation home for "soiled doves."

Hero's interest leads her to Sebastian, whom she has tangled with previously in the series. And so we're off to the races, the two frenemies careening around London one step ahead of their mysterious prey. As the sleuths don't know the why of the killings, they're powerless to stop more of them from occurring. As the clues mount up, they point to an unthinkable, horrifying motive that neither can believe could possibly be true...until the unprecedented event happens despite their efforts to warn of and even stop it.

But that is far from all there is to this tale. The original puzzle of the presence of a well-born woman in a home for fallen women has at its heart a revolting and heart-wrenching revelation. The young woman who died in Hero's arms was, in the final analysis, the most pitiable and unsaveable victim of them all. The revelation of the motive for the youngster to leave Society for a life of whoring causes both Hero and Sebastian a shock that will never leave them. The same would be true in the modern world, I promise you.

There is nothing more fun than watching an expert author, proficient in using her writing talent and marvelously, deeply involved in creating her settings and characters, blow them right out of their comfortable water in the scariest (to them) way possible.

***ADDICTIVE SERIES WARNING*** WHY MERMAIDS SING, third Sebastian St Cyr mystery, takes it up a few notches

WHY MERMAIDS SING
C.S.HARRIS
Berkley Books
$7.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It's September 1811, and someone is killing the wealthy young sons of London's most prominent families. Partially butchered, with strange objects stuffed into their mouths, their bodies are found dumped in public places at dawn. When the grisly remains of Alfred, Lord Stanton's eldest son are discovered in the Old Palace Yard beside the House of Lords, the local magistrate turns to Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help.

Ranging from the gritty world of Thames-side docks to the luxurious drawing rooms of Mayfair, Sebastian finds himself confronting his most puzzling--and disturbing--case yet. With the help of his trusted allies--young servant Tom, Irish doctor Paul Gibson, and his lover Kat Boleyn--Sebastian struggles to decipher a cryptic set of clues that link the scion of a banking family to the son of a humble Kentish vicar. For as one killing follows another, Sebastian discovers he is confronting a murderer with both a method and a purpose to his ritualized killings, and that the key to it all may lie in the enigmatic stanzas of a haunting poem...and in a secret so dangerous that men are willing to sacrifice their own children to keep the truth from becoming known.

My Review: Book three keeps on going at a very high level

This series is a continuing pleasure, I'm thrilled to say. WHY MERMAIDS SING is one of the most disturbing books I've read in a long time, right up there with THE WASP FACTORY. The things that Harris has the killer do to these young men are truly scary. Even more disturbing to me is the who and the why of these violent violations of the young victims.

Harris has, as is standard in the series, made Regency London as real as anything in this room I'm writing in. The smells, the sights, the incredible inequality of income that assaults modern sensibilities. The characters, the veneers they wear, the stark contrast between their insides and outsides. It's a pleasure to read a good writer's strong writing and follow a plot that shows inventive ingenuity of a high order.

St Cyr is a terrific guide to London, as his ancestry (he's a viscount) opens doors that his disgrace (undeserved, I assure you) would otherwise close. That's as true down the social order as it is up. The fact that he ends this book with a rather new set of problems and issues, well...Harris...that is....

Oh my heck. Jeemenee Christmas. Holy Mongolia.

There aren't words...none that I know...for me to describe this entry's Big Reveal. It is truly a reveal, and "big" is a paltry small word for what goeth on here.

It makes perfect sense, in context, but it has a wallop that rocks my world.

Yeah. Make that two big reveals, each bigger than the last and holy maloley can I ever not wait for volume four to get here. NOW!!!!

***Warning*** Addictive Mystery Series WHAT ANGELS FEAR, book 1

WHAT ANGELS FEAR
C.S. HARRIS
Berkley Books
$8.99 mass market, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It's 1811, and the threat of revolution haunts the upper classes of King George III's England. Then a beautiful young woman is found raped and savagely murdered on the altar steps of an ancient church near Westminster Abbey. A dueling pistol discovered at the scene and the damning testimony of a witness both point to one man, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a brilliant young nobleman shattered by his experience in the Napoleonic Wars.

Now a fugitive running for his life, Sebastian calls upon his skill as an agent during the war to catch the killer and prove his own innocence. In the process, he accumulates a band of unlikely allies, including the enigmatic beauty Kat Boleyn, who broke Sebastian's heart years ago. In Sebastian's world of intrigue and espionage, nothing is as it seems, yet the truth may hold the key to the future of the British monarchy, as well as to Sebastian's own salvation....

My Review: BOOK ONE OF ADDICTIVE SERIES

You've been warned.

It's amazing how involving I *still* find the Regency, even after many and various outrages perpetrated on its remnant mummy corpse. People with ultramod unprejudiced 'tudes bearing titles like Lord Shavingrazorden and the Duchess of Murkwatter,entertaining. People traveling to far points without seeming to spend the required months. I mean seriously, how did all those East Indiamen get to Fort Thingummy in Malaya in a twinkling? Ye Olde Concorde?

*ahem*

This book does its share of anachronism-perpetuating. Devlin, our hero, is a straight (in all senses)-ahead 21st century romance hero. Doesn't make him unappealing; it makes me a little impatient, I guess.

What makes this book so appealing to me is the atmosphere, the evocation of the London that one writer characterized as "...diamonds gleaming in the manure pile." Rich was better than poor by right; titles better than all the masses by right; royalty? Fuhgeddaboudit.

The characters around Devlin are all very clearly delineated, and several recur (no spoiler in that, since it's a series mystery) with evolving storylines that tie them into a unit in some unexpexcted and, honestly, some surprising and upsetting ways. Of course the female characters are single-emotion placeholders. I say of course because a first mystery usually has this minor and female character flaw, giving them shorter shrift than is advisable early on.

Withal the book is very worthy of your shelf space; the series is high quality reading; and the price of entry paltry compared to the pleasures you'll get.