Where the Dead Lie: A Sebastian St. Cry Mystery #12 (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery, Band 12) - Softcover

Buch 12 von 21: Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries

Harris, C. S.

 
9780451471208: Where the Dead Lie: A Sebastian St. Cry Mystery #12 (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery, Band 12)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451471202 ISBN 13: 9780451471208
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“The entire series is simply elegant.”—Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author

In this historical mystery from the national bestselling author of Who Slays the Wicked, the abduction and murder of a young boy takes Sebastian St. Cyr from the gritty streets of London to the glittering pleasure haunts of the aristocracy...

London, 1813. One of the city's many homeless children, Benji Thatcher was abducted and murdered—and his younger sister is still missing. Few in authority care about a street urchin's fate, but Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, refuses to let this killer go unpunished.

Uncovering a disturbing pattern of missing children, Sebastian is drawn into a shadowy, sadistic world. As he follows a grim trail that leads from the writings of the debauched Marquis de Sade to the city's most notorious brothels, he comes to a horrifying realization: Someone from society's upper echelon is preying upon the city's most vulnerable. And though dark, powerful forces are moving against him, Sebastian will risk his reputation and his life to keep more innocents from harm...

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C. S. Harris is the national bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, featuring When Falcons Fall, Who Buries the Dead, Why Kings Confess, and What Darkness Brings; as C. S. Graham, a thriller series coauthored by former intelligence officer Steven Harris; and seven award-winning historical romances written under the name Candice Proctor.

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Chapter 1

Monday, 13 September 1813, the hours before dawn

T he boy hated this part. Hated the eerie way the pale, waxen faces of the dead seemed to glow in the faintest moonlight. Hated being left alone with a stiffening body while he dug its grave.

He kicked the shovel deep into the ground and felt his heart leap painfully in his chest when the scrape of dirt against metal sounded dangerously loud in the stillness of the night. He sucked in a quick breath, the musty smell of damp earth thick in his nostrils, his fingers tightening on the smooth wooden handle as he paused to cast a panicked glance over one shoulder.

A mist was drifted up from the Fleet to curl around the base of the nearby shot tower and creep along the crumbling brick walls of the abandoned warehouses beyond it. He heard a dog bark somewhere in the distance and, nearer, a soft thump.

What was that?

The boy waited, his mouth dry, his body tense and trembling. But the sound was not repeated. He swiped a ragged sleeve across his sweaty face, swallowed hard, and bent into his work. He was uncomfortably aware of the cloaked gentleman watching from the seat of the cart that waited at the edge of the field. The gentleman had helped drag Benji's body over to the looming shot tower. But he never helped dig. Gentlemen didn't dig graves, although they could and did kill with a vicious delight that made the boy shiver as he threw another shovelful of dirt onto the growing pile.

The hole was beginning to take shape. Another six inches or so and he'd-

"Hey!"

The boy's head snapped around, and he froze.

A ragged, skeletally thin figure lurched from the gaping doorway of one of the tumbledown warehouses. "Wot ye doin' there?"

The shovel hit the ground with a clatter as the boy bolted. He fell into the newly dug grave and went down, floundering in the loose dirt. Feet flailing, he reared up on splayed hands, found solid ground, and pushed off.

"Oye!" shouted the ghostly specter.

The boy tore across the uneven field, his breath soughing in and out, his feet pounding. He saw the gentleman in the cart jerk, saw him gather the reins and spank them hard against his horse's rump.

"Wait for me!" screamed the boy as the cart lurched forward, its iron-rimmed wheels rattling over the rutted lane. "Stop!"

The gentleman urged the horse into a wild canter. He did not look back.

The boy leapt a low, broken stretch of the stone wall that edged the field. "Come back!"

The cart careened around the corner and out of sight, but the boy tore after it anyway. Surely the gentleman would stop for him? He wouldn't simply leave him, would he?

Would he?

The boy was sobbing now, his nose running, his chest aching as he fought to draw air into his lungs. It wasn't until he reached the corner himself that he dared risk a frantic look back and realized the skeletal figure wasn't following him.

The man-for the boy saw now that it was a man and not some hideous apparition-had paused beside the raw, unfinished grave. And he was staring down at what was left of Benji Thatcher.

Chapter 2

Tuesday, 14 September

S ebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, braced his hands against the bedroom windowsill, his gaze on the misty scene below. In the faint light of dawn, Brook Street lay empty except for a kitchen maid scrubbing the area steps of the house next door.

He could not explain what had driven him from his bed. His dreams were often disturbed by visions of the past, as if he were condemned to relive certain moments over and over in a never-ending spiral of repentance and atonement. But for the second morning in a row he'd awakened abruptly with no tortured memories, only a vague sense of disquiet as inexplicable as it was disturbing.

He heard a shifting of covers and turned as Hero came to stand beside him. "Did I wake you?" he asked, sliding an arm around his wife's warm body to draw her closer.

"I needed to get up anyway." She rested her head on his shoulder, her fine brown hair sliding softly across his bare flesh. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as he, with strong features and eyes of such piercing intelligence that she frightened a good portion of their contemporaries. "I promised my mother I'd come meet a cousin she has visiting, but first I want to read through my article one more time before I turn it in to my editor."

"Ah. So what's your next project?"

"I haven't decided yet."

She was writing a series of articles on the poor of London, an endeavor that greatly irritated her powerful father, Charles, Lord Jarvis. But Hero was not the kind of woman to allow anyone's opinions to dissuade her from what she believed to be the right course of action.

Sebastian ran his hand up and down her back and nuzzled her neck. "Who's the cousin?"

"A Mrs. Victoria Hart-Davis. I believe she's the granddaughter of one of my mother's uncles, but I could have that wrong. She was raised in India, so I've never met her."

"And she's staying with your mother?"

"Mmm. For weeks."

"Jarvis must be thrilled."

Hero gave a soft chuckle. Jarvis's low opinion of most females was notorious. "Fortunately he's so busy plotting how to rearrange Europe after NapolŽon's defeat that I doubt he'll be around enough to be overly annoyed by her."

"Bit premature, isn't it?" NapolŽon was in retreat, but he was still far from defeated.

"You know Jarvis; he's always been confident of victory. After all, with both God and the irrepressible sweep of history on our side, how can England fail? Such a brazen upstart must be wiped from the face of the earth." Her smile faded as she searched Sebastian's face, and he wondered what she saw there. "So what woke you? Troublesome dreams?"

He shook his head, unwilling to put his thoughts into words. Yet the sense of restless foreboding remained. And when a patter of rapid footsteps broke the silence of the deserted street and a boy appeared out of the mist, he somehow knew the lad would turn to run up their front steps.

Hero glanced at the ormolu clock on the bedroom mantel. "A messenger arriving at this hour of the morning can't be bringing good news."

"No," agreed Sebastian, and turned from the window.

Chapter 3

P aul Gibson dropped the wet cloth he'd been using into the basin of water and straightened, his arms wrapping across his chest, his gaze on the pallid face of the half-washed corpse laid out on the stone slab before him. The boy had been just fifteen years old, painfully underfed and small for his age, his features delicate, his flaxen hair curling softly away from his face as it dried. What had been done to the lad's emaciated body twisted at something deep inside Gibson, something the surgeon had thought deadened long ago.

He was a man in his mid-thirties, Irish by birth, his black hair already heavily intermixed with silver, the lines on his face dug deep by the twin ravages of pain and an opium addiction he knew was slowly killing him. There was a time not so long ago when he'd been a regimental surgeon. He'd seen soldiers blown into unidentifiable bloody shreds by cannon fire and hideously maimed by sword and shot. He'd helped bury more butchered, mutilated women and children than he could bear to remember....

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451471202
ISBN 13 
9780451471208
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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