By Clea Simon

As in her previous thrillers, Donna Raybourn’s dry wit serves double duty: defining our erudite heroine and presenting her view of a world that does not know what to make of her.

A Grave Robbery by Deanna Raybourn. Berkley Books, 336 pp., $28

A kick-ass feminist protagonist who isn’t squeamish about lethal force? Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age had me from the start. The coterie of determined and deadly women in the 2022 thriller were not only smart (as was the book’s plotting, character development, and dialogue), they were all at least 60 years old, a device that served to launch the story and also, obviously, draw in readers like me, a near contemporary of the 55-year-old Raybourn, who may have shied away from her earlier works, historical mysteries that leaned heavily on romance, fearing that they would be limp panderings to convention, or worse.

But once I was done with Killers (and before a 2025 sequel, Kills Well with Others, had been announced), I found myself craving the snappy dialogue that Raybourn excels at. And so, with a bit of trepidation, I picked up A Curious Beginning, the first of her Edgar Award–nominated Veronica Speedwell mysteries featuring a lady lepidopterist (butterfly collector) in Victorian England. I found that same smart humor — in the mouth of a kick-ass feminist protagonist who wasn’t reluctant to use lethal force. In fact, in the person of Speedwell, Raybourn outdoes her contemporary protagonists, with a heroine who defies cultural norms in financial independence, dress, and bodily autonomy. Add in that she’s managed to customize the costumes of the day to serve her needs, with a stiletto secreted among the ribs of her corset and hat pins that are sharpened to a killing point, and you have a character for the ages.

In the course of eight addictive books, Raybourn developed Speedwell’s character even further. The beautiful and mysterious freethinker uncovered the secrets of her birth and saved the leader of a European country. She has openly taken a lover, the outcast nobleman and fellow scientist known as Stoker, on the condition that they remain on equal terms. And she solved several murders, bringing the culprits to justice in her own inimitable way. (As she put it: “Peril was not our business, but it was most definitely our vocation.”)

In the series’s ninth and latest installment, A Grave Robbery, the couple’s patron, the Earl of Rosemorran, has acquired a new rarity for his sprawling collection, a lifelike figure of a woman, apparently asleep in a glass coffin. Such “sleeping beauties,” the intrepid Speedwell relates, have become all the rage since Madame Tussaud’s wax museum acquired one, presumably modeled on Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry, which was equipped with a mechanism that made the figure appear to breathe. But when Stoker cuts the figure open to retrofit a similar mechanism, he discovers that the wax-like figure is not in fact a model. It – she – is a remarkably preserved but very real human corpse.

Needless to say, the pair soon embark on a quest to identify the dead beauty, avenge her death, and figure out how and why she ended up as a curiosity. Related, as usual, as Speedwell’s own meticulous record of the events (written, she explains, because “memory is an unreliable, meretricious hussy”), their adventure takes them on the road to a traveling circus where Stoker was once employed and into the confines of a private club for intellectual ladies where Speedwell is a member. There is also a stop at the private estate of a (possibly) mad nobleman and some mingling with artists, scientists, and a surprisingly squeamish undertaker. Along the way, Speedwell and Stoker are joined by a droll cast of characters, including the formidable antique Lady Wellington and Rosemorran’s strikingly precocious young daughter, Lady Rose (who, of course, resembles Veronica in many ways, none of which Speedwell will acknowledge). Patricia, Rosemorran’s Galapagos tortoise, a spiteful monkey, and a pack of rescue dogs whose number increases with almost every adventure round out the cast.

In keeping with her protagonist’s period, Raybourn’s narrative tends toward the wordy, with detailed descriptions of everything from Veronica’s costumes (including her lethal modifications) to the minutiae that show off her heroine’s broad and largely self-taught expertise (“He counted to twenty — in a particularly challenging dialect of Portuguese…”). In addition to setting some very colorful scenes, this approach — essentially a running first-person monologue — allows us to laugh both with and at our admirable heroine, whose principles and awareness of the world outpace her self-knowledge at times. As in the previous books, Raybourn’s dry wit serves double duty: defining our erudite heroine and presenting her view of a world that does not know what to make of her.

Despite the humor, A Grave Robbery is perhaps the most gruesome of Speedwell’s adventures, and at times it gets a little bogged down in its own backstory (the history of wax museums, for example, and the obligatory Frankenstein references). In general, Raybourn’s prose remains as fresh as ever, but in such a delightful series even minor lapses jar. It may be necessary to repeat some details in each volume — for example, a description of the minuten (“the headless pins that are an essential tool of any entomologist’s kit”) secreted in Speedwell’s cuffs. But they seem ever so slightly less well incorporated into the flow here, as if Raybourn herself were growing tired of such prerequisites.

Perhaps it’s just as well that the author’s next work is the Killers follow-up. Veronica Speedwell deserves many more adventures, but even intrepid lady lepidopterists deserve a break. While I count myself among the faithful readers who will leap to read the next book, I hope Speedwell and Stoker will take the time to rest up, for Speedwell to finish the follow-up to her paper, “Observations on the Hand-Rearing of Rare Lepidoptera,” and for Raybourn to find another historically accurate and yet somehow wondrously silly adventure for us all.

Somerville-based novelist Clea Simon is the author of the upcoming amateur sleuth mystery Bad Boy Beat. She can be reached at www.CleaSimon.com.