A GRAVE ROBBERY

Two intrepid sleuths encounter murders, wild adventures, and other Victorian oddities.

Veronica Speedwell and Stoker Templeton-Vane live on the estate of the Earl of Rosemorran, whose vast collection of objects they catalogue and repair. Rosemorran has recently purchased a life-size wax figure in a glass casket, resembling Sleeping Beauty, as a birthday gift for his daughter, and he asks Stoker to add a mechanism that will make the figure appear to be breathing. When Stoker cuts into it, though, he’s horrified to realize that it was once an actual woman, somehow made to look like the kind of waxwork that appears at Madame Tussaud’s. The sleuths want to know where the body came from, who the lady was, and how she died. A close study suggests she was a housemaid who was pregnant and drowned, either by accident, suicide, or murder. Veronica and Stoker question Lord Rosemorran, who sets them on the trail of a most peculiar and dangerous case. Their first stop for information is the circus, where they learn that someone named Lord Ambrose Despard had purchased a waxwork they remember from their former adventures. A visit to Despard reveals an eccentric collector who has something to hide. With some help from a journalist friend and an ambitious Scotland Yard detective, the sleuths follow a trail that will eventually reveal all, though not in time to prevent more deaths.

A puzzling mystery bolstered by an exploration of bizarre Victorian mores.