City of Darkness and Light
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Sally Fellows. Sally was one of the first champions of the Molly Murphy series, a terrific friend and mentor to the mystery community, and an aficionada of all things historical. She loved good wine, good friends, good books, her dog. The only thing she hated was bad puns. At every convention we will go on looking at the empty chair where we expect to find her and sigh a little.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Postscript
Also by Rhys Bowen
About the Author
Copyright
One
New York City, May 1905
Like many Irish people I have always been a strong believer in a sixth sense. In fact I had prided myself on mine. I credited it with alerting me to danger more than once during my career as an investigator. So I can’t explain why it let me down on such a critical occasion, when an advance warning might have spared us all such grief. Maybe the perpetrator of this evil had not planned it in advance. Maybe it had been a last-minute order from above, so I had not been able to sense his intention or his presence … or their presence. I’m sure there must have been more than one of them. That was how they worked.
Anyway, there were certainly no uneasy thoughts in my head that bright May morning as I fed my little one his breakfast. He was eight months old now, a strapping boy with a shock of dark curls like his father and an impish smile. Now I think back on it I wonder if Aggie hadn’t been the one with the sixth sense, although she had no Celtic connections that I knew of. She came into the kitchen while I was feeding Liam, bearing two letters in her hand.
“Mail just arrived, Mrs. Sullivan,” she said. “Two letters for you. One with a foreign stamp.”
“That will be from my friends in Paris, I expect,” I said, taking them from her. “How nice.”
I took in Sid’s bold black script on the foreign envelope and noted that the other was my mother-in-law’s weekly missive. The former would wait until I had the proper time to savor Sid’s latest account of their adventures in Paris. The latter could simply wait.