The Frost Fair by Edward Marston

When the Thames freezes over, the King declares a Frost Fair, and the whole of London comes out onto the ice to celebrate, including architect Christopher Redmayne, his love Susan Cheever, and Christopher's Puritan friend, Constable Jonathan Bayle. But when one of Jonathan's sons literally comes face to face with a man imprisoned deep within the ice, he hardly knows then that Christopher's brother will be accused of the crime... or that the blackening of Christopher's good name will nearly be the death of his career as an architect!

Constable Bale has met Christopher Redmayne's brother, Henry, and believes him to be a dissipated roué, not to mention very likely guilty of the crime. But when his friend asks him to investigate for himself to find the truth of the matter, guilty or innocent, it takes a plea from his wife to get him to agree. At first, he doesn't find much to suggest that Henry is innocent. He interviews some of the men who went out with Henry on that fateful night, and discovers that the dead man, one Jeronimo Maldini, was a master fencer.

And that is how Henry encountered him and learned to hate him. For he employed Maldini as a fencing tutor, but the man enjoyed humiliating him, and took away from Henry a woman he loved, and bedded her. But with Henry being drunk at the time of the encounter and clearly less of a swordsman, could he have held off the other armed with only a dagger and somehow stabbed the man in the back? It seems *very* unlikely, and it soon becomes clear that one of Henry's so-called 'friends' is actually nothing of the sort, and may have conspired to bring the murdered man together with Henry for the sole purpose of killing Maldini and saddling Henry Redmayne with the blame for the deed.

Meanwhile, Christopher finds he is losing some of his clients, who are eager to distance themselves from Christopher when they find his brother has been arrested and charged with the Murder of Maldini. They assume that Christopher is like his brother and won't have anything to do with him, except for one client who will not blame Christopher, Lady Whitcombe. But she has designs on more than Christopher's designs for a house in London. She seeks to marry him off to her daughter, a girl who has little brains and an irritating giggle. But her son, whom Christopher is designing the house mainly for, doesn't want such an architect whose name is embroiled in scandal, and he disparages Christopher at every opportunity.

As Jacob Bale, Christopher Redmayne and Susan Cheever work together to clear Henry's good name (what remains of it, anyway), Christopher himself comes under attack, and it is clear that someone is angry with the attempt to clear Henry's name, which lends Christopher more support to his idea that Henry is being blamed for the deed of another man. But can Christopher win Henry's freedom by finding the real culprit who has done the deed in time, or will Henry succumb to the despair that being in prison creates in him and commit suicide before his brother and his friends can free him from Newgate?

I loved this period mystery set after the Great Fire in London of 1666. Christopher Redmayne is an architect helping with the design and rebuilding of the city, and his friend Joseph Bale is very different from him, a family man, constable (who were usually drawn from the lower classes of society) and a Puritan to boot. He and Christopher may be wildly different in class and beliefs, but have managed to become friends anyhow. As a Puritan, though, he has nothing but disdain for Christopher's brother Henry, who has a job in the Navy Office, but prefers to spend his time drinking, whoring and trundling from pub to pub with loose friends who do the same.

And then there is Susan Cheever, a woman who Christopher is in love with and wishes to marry, whose rigid father withdraws his permission for her to see Christopher when the scandal of his brother comes to light. Can she get around her sister and her brother-in-law to meet the man she loves despite her father trying to keep them apart? Can love find a way, or will it be blocked by well-meaning but wrong-thinking people? There is also a plot afoot to marry Susan off to a man who is completely dominated by his hypocondriac mother, who Susan esteems but doesn't love.

I liked the feel of the novel, which portrayed London as a city still partly ruined, but seething with life, and the characters who work and play and live there as real and alive as people in the modern day, but yet somewhat different. Despite these characters being in a novel, they seemed just as real as someone I might meet on the street today, with just as complex motivations and lives just as real and full. The plot itself is not complex, although the real villain is hidden until the very end, and provides the plot with several twists and turns that keep up your interest until the last page. I recommend this book, and its author, who is responsible for more than one historical mystery series, highly. Anyone looking for an engaging, easily readable, historical mystery that grounds you firmly in the people and politics of the time should look no further than Edward Marston.