Murder at King’s Crossing is the 8th Wrexford & Sloane regency mystery by Andrea Penrose. Released 24th Sept 2024 by Kensington, it's 368 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. For Kindle Unlimited subscribers, this book is currently included in the KU subscription library to borrow and read for free.The earlier books in the series are currently available on KU as well.
This is an engaging and well written series. It's an ensemble character driven cozy(ish) historical murder mystery with a strong element of romance. The author has written the story around a framework of fictionalized historical characters and she does a good job of interweaving the real historical facts with the fictional narrative allowing for some minor poetic license regarding names, dates, and times. This installment, as most of them, contain a fair bit of science/technology/engineering of the period, and feature some cameos from well known names in the scientific world of the time.
Although self-contained in the narrative arc, the cast of characters have a long history together, so it works well enough as a standalone, but it's strongly recommend to read the series in order because of character development spoilers (in fact the titular series characters have progressed from near-enemies in book one to stably married and settled now). The language is very clean, there's some violence used in context, and very little sexual content.
The author does take some thinly veiled pokes at colonialism, racism, slavery, unscrupulous profiteers, and the military industrial complex in this book which have distinct takeaways for our modern world. The narrative arc and denouement and resolution are satisfying for the genre (a little swoony and overwrought, but not egregiously so). This is the eighth book, and there's a ninth due out in third quarter 2025 from the same publisher.
The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 11 hours, 46 minutes, and is expertly read by series narrator James Cameron Stewart. He has a well modulated light baritone voice and a surprisingly masterful control with regional UK accents of the period as well as a few non-local-accents (including southern German) without a hitch. Interestingly, his Scottish accent isn't painful to listen to (it's his native dialect), nor is his upper class Regency English RP type accent (which presumably isn't). Sound and production quality are high throughout.
Enjoyable cozy murder / romance. Four stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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