"Wear a gown. Meet me at Her Majesty's Theatre. Seven o'clock."
Inspector Graham Redgrave has never invited Clara Wetherly to the opera. The note in her shop says nothing about why. She arrives in her grandmother's altered green silk to find him in evening dress—the third son of an earl, finally wearing the clothes he was raised in—and a curtain full of secrets she has been brought to help him watch.
The case is small at first. Three pieces of jewellery, taken from the upper-tier boxes during the intervals. The kind of crime the Commissioner would prefer Graham resolve quietly.
Then the soprano sings her final aria—and fifteen minutes later, she is dead in her dressing room.
Backstage at Her Majesty's, everyone has a reason. A patron with hothouse flowers piled to the ceiling. An understudy who learns the aria the next morning. A composer with a song no one would ever hear. An ex-lover from Milan who slips desperate notes beneath Clara's door—and then is gone.
Back at Hawthorne & Wetherly, Genevieve turns The Gilded Leaf to a page Clara has never read. Marmalade hisses at an intruder who turns and runs into the night.
And, one quiet evening, Graham Redgrave finally tells Clara about a loss he has carried for years—a woman who died, an aristocrat who walked away, a system that decided it did not matter.
A case where the courts will not provide the ending. And the Ladies of Bloomsbury hold the truth when no one else will.
Book 5 in the bestselling Tarot & Tea Leaves Mysteries.
