The Last Pre-Raphaelites

London, 1930: a great retrospective is about to open at the Tate celebrating the forgotten women of English art — painters, enamellists, and craftswomen who were ignored, patronised, or exhibited under the shadow of husbands and brothers — and their champion Lady Honoria Haverleigh, patron and reformer, died last year in a private clinic with the certificate recording heart failure during sleep; but a young doctor noticed that on the night she died three old friends visited her room and a glass she had refused for two days was found empty by morning; as the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion enter galleries where pictures lean against walls like patients awaiting diagnosis, they find a missing blue Venetian bottle, notes hidden behind frames reading "Ask them what mercy costs" and "May forgave us," a gifted enameller whose work was signed by her husband, and three women who have carried a terrible secret for a year waiting for someone to ask the right question; inspired by the lives of Lady Christiana Herringham, May Hart Partridge, and the women artists of the Arts and Crafts movement while remaining entirely fictional, The Last Pre-Raphaelites is an original Golden Age–style mystery about art, attribution, and the discovery that the most difficult murder to judge is the one committed by people who loved the victim more than the law allows.