The Butcher of Smithfield by Susannah Gregory

Thomas Chaloner is a spy, and rather a good one. but when he returns to England after a long sojourn in Spain and Portugal at the behest of the Queen, he returns to a life turned upside down. His rooms are a mess, thanks to marauding moths and mice, and a fire that burned nearby. His patron is upset at him for not finding a reason to refuse the Queen, and is withholding the money that Thomas needs to live on and repair his house and wardrobe. And one of his better friends, a court musician, has died, apparently from eating cucumbers, which are said to be poisonous by Galen, a noted ancient medicker and philosopher.

But Thomas's friend isn't the only one who's died of eating cucumbers, and it seems that this form of death is becoming more and more common around town. Is it a failure of the cucumber crop? Or is it someone seeking to hide death by poison with the excuse of their victims eating cucumbers to blame it on? Thomas investigates and discovers that his friend was smothered- there are teeth prints on the inside of his lip, a broken tooth, and blood and a tear on a pillow from his friend's house. Now that he knows that his friend's death was murder, he sets out investigating the death of another spy, also said to be from cucumbers.

The man has a green stain on his fingers, but Thomas realizes from some testing that the stains didn't come from the cucumbers the man was said to have eaten. And he was investigating the government-run newspapers, which have only become so much propoganda in recent months. In fact, people are turning more and more to the newsletters, which are hand-written and therefore not under government control, to the point that the newsletters are more trusted for news, especially foreign news, than the official government printed newspapers, whose thunder is also being stolen by the newsletters, which always seem to be able to be written and distributed first.

Thomas also fights to liberate his friend from a grasping, greedy wife who is a thief, and prevent her from killing or actually marrying his friend before they can be separated by fair means or foul. But Thomas's friend is besotted with his woman. Can Thomas and his other friends open his eyes before he is dead or killed by the woman who professes to love him? But her reaction to Thomas is no better than that of Thomas to her, and she treats him as if he was a leper. But how far will his friend go to defend the woman he loves? Will his "marriage" drive a permanent wedge between the two of them?

London's river is rising, the Thames overrunning its banks after weeks of nothing but rain. As Thomas attempts to find out who killed his friend, and his fellow spy. But does it have anything to do with the newsman with a Svengali-like hold over the women who work for him as proofreaders? The mysterious crime lord of the city? Or do the deaths by "cucumber" have nothing to do with either, and will he have to look elsewhere for the killer?

This is the third Thomas Chaloner mystery, and the spy has returned home to straitened circumstances. His rooms are a mess, his clothes in tatters, and his boss in the ministry seems to hate him for reasons that Chaloner had no control over. But as soon as he is back in service, his boss sets him a seemingly impossible task: to discover who killed the spy supposedly poisoned by cucumbers- mainly because his widow has been pestering the boss for money, and if Chaloner can prove he died because of activities unrelated to his death as a spy, his boss won't have to pay the widow a pension.

Meanwhile, of course, he's being distracted by other concerns, the death of one friend and the imprisonment of another in marriage to a woman who only seems to care about his money. As well, Chaloner is missing the woman he fell in love with in Spain, Isabelle, who he was forced to flee from after being exposed as a spy. This book has an oppressive, dark and dank feeling. It's almost constantly raining, and this comes to a head at the end of the book, where London actually floods, but another oppressive feeling is that Chaloner no longer knows what is going on in his own country, after so long abroad.

So, he's almost an outsider in his own home, cut off by almost two years abroad without knowledge or news, which is startling but merely reinforces how the past is not like today. There is no instantaneous transmission of news, and you can get so far behind that your home is like a foreign country to you. But even as Chaloner struggles to save his friend, it is his own friends that end up saving him as much, with donations of clothes, cash, food and friendly talk and news, Chaloner is often saved from blunders by his friends. And the life of a spy is no place to be without friends... if they can be trusted.

This book brought up a little realized fact about the past and really brought home how alien a place it could be at times. This contributes to a great sense of place and the aliennation of how Chaloner feels and the aliennation of the life of a spy, unable to trust anyone with your entire life and everything you have been doing because of the possibility of being betrayed, either accidentally or knowingly. It's a hard, dangerous, lonely life, and was even more so back in Restoration London. Thomas Chaloner lets us get a look into that life, and see how horrible it was, giving us another means to identify with him as he tries to reconstruct what he had. You will definitely feel you are in the past here, and just how alien a place that is. Recommended.