In this book, Harry Armitage has begun his private investigator's office and offers Cleopatra Fox all of the requests to follow a wife or husband in order to get infidelity proof for divorce. She contacts all of them but only one, Warrington, hires her. This turns into a murder investigation when his wife, Isobel, is murdered in their drawing room. Cleo is under scrutiny from her uncle about why she goes out so often as he does not want her investigating anything or seeing Harry Armitage. Meanwhile her aunt is trying to marry her off, but Cleo does not want to marry anyone. ( )

Cleopatra Fox is disappointed when, far from agreeing to take her on as a partner, private detective Harry Armitage simply offers her the cases he doesn’t want - cases where husbands (and in one case, a wife) are looking for proofs needed to divorce their wives. She takes on the jobs if only to prove to Mr. Armitage that she can complete them on her own, but when Mrs. Warrington, wife of one of these men, is murdered in her own drawing room, Mr. Armitage thinks he has the right to take the case back. Of course Cleo refuses to let him, and together they delve into the sordid nature of marriages of convenience, photographic studios that provide more than a wholesome service, and the political strife of early 1900 England, in which women are starting to agitate for the vote more and more - and may not stop at murder to achieve it…. This is the third Cleo Fox book, all set in London in 1900. The time period is very curious to modern readers, given how little females were supposed to know, how few places they could even aspire to attend and how certain men seem to be about women’s inability to act in any capacity other than those few, narrowly defined roles; Ms. Archer does a good job of invoking that time and place, although as with previous books in the series, I found a few spots where the language seemed anachronistic to me. Still, those few terms weren’t enough to jar me out of the story, and I find the mysteries to be well done. The relationship between Cleo and Harry is churning along in a believable way, and her relationships with her family and members of the hotel staff are quite entertaining too. As this is only the third in a project series (of four as far as I know), I think any reader could start here without missing too much information, although generally it’s best to start a series at the beginning. That said, recommended! ( )