I received this book as an Advanced Reading Copy through a Goodreads giveaway!
I enjoyed this book and found it to be a fast, fun read. The author has done her research quite well. I like that the heroine is so entranced by her scholarly pursuits: museums, history, art, language, literature. Those things make the book fun and intelligent. The mystery was very intriguing, but when it came time to start putting the final pieces together and solve it, I felt like plausibility was getting a bit strained. All the jumping around to different locations with codes of letters and numbers became a bit far-fetched. The final confrontation with the culprit also didn't ring quite true--hard to harmonize the actual demeanor of this person (when caught) with the disturbing, cruel behavior and written messages left by this person.

The language doesn't always feel accurate to the time period. Like when the heroine says she "flopped" into a chair. ( )

I did enjoy this installment up until a point — suffragette action, our old gang of characters back together (although I missed the French set), included a satisfyingly cerebral treasure hunt puzzle, however I was sincerely disappointed that the only person of color turned out to be the bad guy due to frustrated ambitions, and Colin’s still an untrustworthy fellow. Lame. ( )

Lady Emily & her husband Colin are back in London from their travels. During a ball at Lady Londonderry's, Colin gets word that a highly respected businessman has been burned to death in his office. The dead man's Fiancée, begins to receive threatening notes requesting that she hand over that which he supposedly gave her. When she is unable to produce the item(s), she is kidnapped and eventually found dead.

At the same time: society people are finding their doors & porches painted red by a mysterious person and their dirty secrets revealed to society; Emily attends a group of politically minded society mavens who are working to secure the vote for women; a judgmental gossip monger delights in racking up the muck; and an eccentric society maven is also kidnapped.

Together Colin, Emily, Jeremy, & Emily's close friend Ivy work to solve the crimes and exposing fraud in high-up places.

This book was better written than several previous ones. There were not as many distasteful characters and thankfully Emily's mother was mostly absent. The idea of ciphers via book & museum catalogs was interesting, as was the idea of housing within factories for the poor & handicapped.

What I didn't care for was the use of Ivy's journal entries, I found those boring; one or two would have been enough, but they continued through until the end when Ivy admitted her guilty secret. ( )

Lady Emily and her dashing husband, Colin Hargreaves, are solving another mystery. Someone is determined to let loose everyone's dark secrets, and ostracize them in society. The crimson paint dashed on front doors carries similar symbology as Hawthorne's red "A." But when murder strikes after a front door has been painted, the crimson paint suddenly takes on a more dastardly meaning. Will Lady Emily and Colin be able to solve the mystery in time? Especially, when their front door gets splashed with red paint? ( )

Reading historical fiction like this always makes me glad I did not find myself by accident of birth growing up in a society like what existed among the elite in 1800s England. Sexist books, as readers of my reviews may have caught on by now, bug me, but this book is drawing attention to and poking holes in sexism, rather than promoting and perpetuating it. So, while I was bristling at the way women were expected to act and appear in the world of this book, so was the protagonist. The solution to the mystery of the vandalism and murder in this story seemed a bit unsupported, enough that I actually don't remember without looking it up again who the villain was. It didn't make enough sense because the villain was not well enough developed as a character, I think, though I liked the solution to the second kidnapping a lot. ( )