The Opal Serpent

Fergus Hume built this Edwardian mystery around a shabby London bookshop and one sinister object: an opal brooch shaped like a coiled serpent. Paul Beecot, a young writer chasing a literary career, falls for Sylvia Norman, whose father Aaron runs a gloomy secondhand shop and guards far more than he admits. When Aaron is found strangled, the opal serpent pinning his dead lips together, the crime proves to echo an almost identical killing more than twenty years earlier. Hume, already famous for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, threads the puzzle through a London that runs from cramped back rooms to comfortable drawing rooms. Readers who enjoy tangled turn-of-the-century whodunits, laced with a strong strand of romance, will find this one busy, atmospheric, and cleverly resolved.