From Booklist
Nell Bray is a no-nonsense, passionate suffragette living in turn-of-the-century London. She also happens to be a superb amateur sleuth. Nell leaves London for a visit to the family home and, naturally, becomes involved in a murder case. Davie Kendal is due to hang for killing local mill owner Osbert Newbiggin. Davie's lawyer, a charismatic man named Bill Musgrave, has tried every trick in the book to save him, but all the evidence points to the young man's guilt. Davie's sister and Musgrave beg Nell to help prove Davie's innocence. The case is difficult and baffling, and it's only when Nell probes the relationship between Osbert Newbiggin and his pretty young ward, Laura, that she finds the key to the killer's identity. Teaming up with Musgrave and her longtime friend Rose, Nell races against time to find enough evidence to save Davie from the noose. An original and intriguing plot combined with Linscott's eye for period ambience and authentic detail result in yet another fine historical mystery.
Emily Melton
From Kirkus Reviews
What better vacation from Nell Bray's travails of fighting for women's votes than a retreat to her surgeon brother's home in the Lancashire moors--especially when Whinmoor comes complete with a year-old murder? Davie Kendal, the nephew and convicted killer of gramophone engineer and recordist Osbert Newbiggin, is only two weeks from execution, but the deadline only spurs Nell and her sidekick du jour, dismissed teacher Rose Mills (whose presence seems utterly superfluous until a cunningly prepared denouement), to greater heights of industry. In this case, the original problem--digging up evidence that will corroborate Davie's claim of innocence--collapses when his alibi witness turns out so unreliable that even Bill Musgrave, the importunate attorney who'd urged the case on Nell in the first place, becomes convinced of his client's guilt. Even so, there's more promising dirt to dig--the news that despite Newbiggin's fanatical devotion to casting and recording The Messiah, his plaster Handel wasn't the only bust he was interested in. But how will the revelation of Newbiggin as a secret satyr help to rescue Kendal from the hangman's noose? Though the sketchy characters flit by like so many nameless spirits and the Q&A is often as mechanical as a gramophone, Linscott (Crown Witness, 1995) musters her usual ingenuity and her suffragette heroine's starchy good nature for the unraveling. Fans of the series won't be disappointed. --
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