In London, 1666, drinking coffee can get you killed…
The case of Samuel Pepys’s missing pocket watch escalates rapidly when Eustace Blount, writer and wit, is found murdered in Rose’s Coffee House on The Strand.
Blount was a prig, a poseur and a parliamentarian – nobody liked him, not even his friends – and Pepys’s intrepid personal inquisitors, Abby Harcourt and Jacob Standish, find themselves with a suspect list as unwieldy as it is perplexing.
When their investigation leads to the nearby Gilded Bean coffee house, frequented by fervently royalist members of parliament, it becomes clear that a dangerous political game is afoot. Abby and Jacob face their most audacious challenge yet:
To break into Westminster Palace, at the very heart of English politics. The penalty, if discovered – is death.
Ellis Blackwood fell in love with the writings of Samuel Pepys, and the 17th-century England he inhabited, through the great man’s published diaries. The Samuel Pepys Mysteries are the result of that literary love affair.
My thoughts: I really like this series, it’s a lot of fun and brings the hubbub of 17th Century London to vivid life.
The coffee shops were a new concept and where the great and good (and not so good) would meet to talk, boast and scheme. They were male only spaces much of the time and Pepys would have been very familiar with them.
When Pepys asks his two inquisitors to locate his missing pocket watch, which he thinks may be in one of those very coffee shops, they stumble into murder and intrigue, just round the corner from Jacob’s house.
Abby as always, is quicker off the mark and starts to untangle the relationships between the coffee house denizens, the wits who spend their days writing pretty terrible poetry and the politicians who pontificate and squabble just round the corner.
The plot the pair discover threatens the King himself, Charles II, and the heart of government, much like the Gunpowder Plot that almost killed his grandfather.
Clever, entertaining and enjoyable, each installment of this series gets better and better.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 
Thank you so much for being a part of the tour x
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