Regency romance and mystery meet in Vanessa Riley’s ‘Murder in Drury Lane’

Lady Abigail Worthing rarely does what she’s told.

The Regency-era baroness who narrates Vanessa Riley’s “Murder in Drury Lane” has a privileged life — an elegant townhouse in Westminster with a full staff of servants, a doting godfather who is among London’s most powerful men, a lady of leisure’s social schedule. Some in her circle advise her to be content with that.

But Lady Worthing cannot resist a mystery. She loves nothing more than what she calls a puzzle, and Lord Duncan, the magistrate who oversees criminal investigations, has learned to welcome her assistance.

Lady Worthing also loves the theater. So when she attends a performance at the Drury Lane Theatre of “A Bold Stroke for a Wife” and it’s interrupted by the discovery of a freshly murdered body in a props storage room, she makes a beeline for the scene of the crime — despite a chorus of voices warning her it’s not her place because she’s a lady, because she’s a woman and because she’s Black.

“Murder in Drury Lane” is the second book in Riley’s series about Lady Worthing. Riley, who lives in Atlanta, took an unusual route to writing fiction, first earning a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. But her love of storytelling won out, and she has now published more than 20 books: historical novels, historical romances and historical mysteries, many of them set in the Regency era and all of them centering women of color.

The Lady Worthing books combine the posh settings, witty banter and steamy flirtations of romances like the “Bridgerton” series with the too-close-for-comfort mysteries of series like “Murder, She Wrote,” in which main character Jessica Fletcher’s acquaintances had an alarmingly high violent death rate.

In the first Lady Worthing book, “Murder in Westminster,” the victim was her next-door neighbor. This time around, the body in the prop room is that of Anthony Danielson, an employee of Lady Worthing’s favorite theater and an aspiring playwright.

He’s set up an impromptu office in the storage room to work on his new play, which he believes will bring him fame and wealth, a switch from his previous life as a grifter. Riley opens the book with a theatrically structured scene in which three people visit him there in turn during the intermission in the performance. Each of them will become a suspect after he’s found with a prop spear driven into his heart.

They won’t be the only ones. Lady Worthing likes to make a list of her suspects, and in this case it grows longer with each chapter — until she begins to cross off names, not because they’ve been cleared but because they’ve been killed, too.

Even before Danielson’s death, Lady Worthing was on edge. She had returned from a trip out of town to find her townhouse at Two Greater Queen Street vandalized, with windows broken, walls and furniture smeared with red liquid and her husband’s portrait damaged.

That’s her husband in absentia; not long after their marriage, arranged by her godfather, Lord Worthing set off on a sail around the world. The clear-eyed Lady Worthing knows the marriage wasn’t a love match but had hoped to build a relationship, but James just keeps sailing.

Her godfather, Neil Vaughn, tells her the vandalism might have been aimed at her husband, but she feels certain she was its target, for her dark skin or for her support of an abolition bill moving through Parliament that would end the British slave trade — or both.

Riley skillfully puts race in historical context. Lady Worthing is biracial, the daughter of a white English father and a Black Jamaican mother. She’s not the only person of color among the aristocracy, but acceptance of them comes laced with the pervasive racism of the era. Among the real-life characters in the book is playwright, politician and gambler Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who owns the Drury Lane Theatre. Despite Lady Worthing’s social position and her considerable financial support of his theater, he sneeringly calls her a “Blackamoor” to her face.

Others, though, hold her in high esteem, notably her next-door neighbor, Stapleton Henderson. In the first book, his estranged wife was the murder victim, and Lady Worthing considered him a suspect. But now they are allies in this investigation, and perhaps something more. Henderson is a physician who served with the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson, and he’s a fearless and resourceful sort who also happens to have “indigo eyes” Lady Worthing is often distracted by.

The path of the killer will lead to shockingly high places, and Lady Worthing will find herself torn between bringing a criminal to justice or stepping back for the greater good: the passage of the abolition bill.

Riley takes the reader through all the twists and turns, although where Lady Worthing’s heart lies remains a mystery.

Murder in Drury Lane

By Vanessa Riley

Kensington Books, 336 pages, $27

Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading

Vanessa Riley will be a featured author at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading. The festival takes place from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Nov. 11 at The Palladium, 253 Fifth Ave. N., St. Petersburg. Tickets are $25 for general admission and are available at festivalofreading.com.