The cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, by Elsa Hart

Hart, a St. Louis author, has an interesting background of living around the world as a child and an adult, as well as a law degree from Washington University. Her husband is a botanist at MOBot. Many of these facets of her life are present in her newest novel, the start of a promising series. Drawing from her experience of living on the Chinese/Tibet border for her husband’s work, her earlier trilogy centered on an eighteenth century Chinese royal librarian who finds himself embroiled in various mysteries. Her new mystery is set in the early 1700s as well, but this time in England. Lady Cecily Kay, whose husband is a consul in Smyrna (present day Izmir, Turkey), has returned to England alone to work on a collection of dried plant specimens she has assembled abroad. Sir Barnaby Mayne is a noted collector of “curiosities,” which embraces a wide variety of items, from pickled snakes and embalmed birds, to gems, antiquities, fossils, and much, much more, including an important herbarium where Cecily hopes to identify her plants. Arriving at his manor, where she is to stay for two weeks, Cecily meets another guest, Meacan Barlow, who she knew well as a child when Meacan’s gardener father was employed at Cecily’s home. Meacan has been employed by Sir Barnaby as an illustrator. Cecily and several other invited guests are to receive a tour led by Mayne the day she arrives. However, halfway through the tour, a letter arrives and Mayne is called away. When he doesn’t return, most of the guests go their own ways through the various rooms. Before dinner, they discover to their horror that their host has been murdered in his office with a jeweled knife he was about to add to his collection. Although his bloody-handed curator confesses immediately to the crime, he escapes out the back door and is not apprehended. But did he really do it? The twists and turns of the plot are clever, and the at first wary, but soon close, relationship of the two women is well developed. Hart’s atmospheric descriptions of the cluttered, dark, and somewhat ominous homes of Mayne and other local collectors, the smoke and grit of 18th century London, and her understanding of what drives competing collectors to seek out curiosities brought back from newly discovered lands give the book depth. I was particularly taken with her explanation of why people collect: “…whatever else a collection may be, it is, inevitably, a record of the collector’s existence. And, unlike those copies we make of ourselves in our children, a collection remains always within the collector’s control, a faithful testament to what he has seen, and to his thoughts, his judgments, his choices, and his fascinations. The anticipation of its destruction can become, for the collector, another aspect of Death. The thought of its preservation, by extension, is a promise of immortality.” We welcomed Elsa at a Friends’ author event shortly after her first book appeared and I certainly hope, post-pandemic, she will come back to the library to discuss this book, and what may be next for Cecily and Meacan – we haven’t seen the last of this pair. 314 pp.