This is the fourth of the Lady Darcy books I’ve read, and I’ll be nabbing the fifth once the quite long library wait list wends its way to me. It’s interesting to have read this one after my run with the Lady’s Guide books. Superficially they’re similar: an aristocratic widow, fresh off an unhappy marriage, turns to solving mysteries with the help of a handsome, mysterious detective turned love interest. But while the Lady’s Guide books are lively, frivolous, and entirely earn their title of “cozy”, Lady Darcy’s stories have a sharper, darker edge… from the backstory (while both have my sympathies, the former husband thoughtless and careless enough to die in his lover’s bed sets a different tone than the former husband who threatened to break his wife’s fingers so she will never paint again) to the crimes and the way they’re presented, to the ladies themselves. I enjoyed chewing through the Lady’s Guide books and they were a lot of fun, but Lady Darcy’s fierce intensity and cool, steel-coiled spine will forever win me over.

At any rate, I’m at an impasse with both right now because library waitlists, but “English Regency/Victorian murder mystery” is definitely a genre I’ve fallen hard for.