What Remains of Heaven

When a reform-minded bishop is found bludgeoned to death in an ancient crypt—alongside a second corpse that has lain there, unidentified, for decades—the questions multiply faster than the answers. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, steps into an investigation that reaches from London's grimy slaughterhouse district all the way to the corridors of Whitehall power, implicating everyone from royal favorites to the bitter, forgotten son of Benjamin Franklin. And complicating everything is Hero Jarvis, whose fraught history with Sebastian refuses to stay neatly in the past.

C.S. Harris writes with the confidence of an author who genuinely knows her period—Regency London feels inhabited rather than decorated, its politics and class tensions woven into the plot rather than applied as atmosphere. The double-murder structure is particularly well-constructed, forcing Sebastian to untangle crimes separated by thirty years while racing against a very present danger. As the fifth book in the series, it also deepens character threads that have been building since the beginning, rewarding readers who have followed Sebastian's journey while still functioning as a tightly plotted, standalone puzzle.