Fatal Event

Career diplomat Benjamin Hackett has been elevated to a Marquis he doesn't want and Polite Society believes he doesn't deserve; his lover has decided she won't marry him after all and the suspicion he murdered his brother still lingers in York drawing rooms. So returning to York after seven months' seclusion may have been a mistake. Benjamin's foreboding deepens when a nobody vicar drops dead at a party-political dinner; he witnesses the very public humiliation of an up and coming portrait painter, and his rabble-rousing uncle Cornelius is bashed and left for dead in a laneway. When the vicar's true identity is revealed, Benjamin suspects the man was poisoned. But who would want a seemingly harmless man of God murdered, and why?