![]() Turns out, she’s right - but that’s not all. And since the baby was so readily accepted by this high-brow family, Nell knows the baby must be one of the sons’, somehow. Raised in the Irish-Catholic Boston slums, she knows that when a chambermaid hasn’t seen her husband in a year and a half, the baby she just gave birth to definitely isn’t his. Nell, however, infers that it’s not the whole story. ![]() The woman has lost two of her four sons to the Civil War, and tells all who will listen that she’s always wanted a daughter, so why pass up this one? In a move that surprises and shocks Boston society, the matriarch of the family adopts the little girl as her own. The premise is simple: Nell Sweeney, a physician’s assistant, is hired as a governess-cum-nursemaid for the infant Gracie, the daughter of a chambermaid in a Boston Brahmin household. Combining a few tropes familiar to readers of historical fiction with a willful, wonderfully flawed heroine and gorgeous trappings - as well as a tightly-knit plot - this novel is one of the best mysteries I’ve read in quite some time. ![]() ![]() ![]() Ryan’s Still Life with Murder, the first in her Nell Sweeney series. Rarely have I been as captivated by a mystery as I was by P.B. ![]()
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