In what promises to be a breakout in Charles Finch's bestselling series, An Extravagant Death finds Sir Charles Lenox traveling to Gilded Age Newport and New York to investigate the death of a beautiful socialite.
London, 1878. With faith in Scotland Yard shattered after a damning corruption investigation, Charles Lenox's detective agency is rapidly expanding. The gentleman sleuth has all the work he can handle, two children, and an intriguing new murder case.
But when a letter arrives with an unexpected invitation, he's unable to resist the call of an old, unfulfilled yearning: to travel to America. Arriving in New York, he begins to receive introductions into both its old Knickerbocker society and its new robber baron splendor. Then, a shock: the suicide of the season's most beautiful debutante, who has thrown herself from a cliff. Or was it a suicide? Her closest friend doesn't think so, and Lenox, sacrificing his plans, travels to the family's magnificent Newport mansion in the guise of an idle English gentleman. What ensues is a fiendsh game of cat and mouse.
Witty, complex, and tender, An Extravagant Death is Charles Finch's triumphant return to the main storyline of his beloved Charles Lenox series--a devilish mystery, a social drama, and an unforgettable first trip for an Englishman coming to America.