He’s such a lovely hero – clever, well-liked, handsome, charming, and urbane, but there’s been an aura of mystery about him and the sense that he’s suffered some deep hurt that he is at pains to keep hidden.

I freely admit that the big draw – for me – of this book was the opportunity to discover more about Gage’s past. And all of them have secrets they are desperate to keep, even at the risk of prolonging the search for Alfred who, it turns out, vanished almost a fortnight earlier. Her younger son, Rory is more welcoming, while the viscount continues to tyrannise the household from his sickbed. Gage’s aunt, Lady Vanessa is openly hostile to both him and Keira, making it clear that she knows about Keira’s background (and the scandal that continues to dog her owing to her forced involvement in her late husband’s anatomical studies – see The Anatomist’s Wife) and strongly disapproves of their marriage. Their arrival has clearly not been prepared for, and things go pretty much downhill from then on. But Gage is an honourable man and isn’t about to ignore this request for help, no matter that it has come from the family from which he is estranged.

He hasn’t told Keira much about his childhood – he has always been rather cagey when it comes to his past, and she has had to carefully pry information out of him at various points throughout the series – but it’s clear from what he has said that his time there wasn’t happy, and there is no love lost between her husband and his cousin.

Gage hasn’t visited Langstone since his mother died when he was eighteen, and he had, at that time, vowed never to set foot in the place again. Gage’s cousin, Alfred, heir to their grandfather, Viscount Tavistock, has gone missing, and the elderly and ailing viscount wants Gage to find him.īook six, A Brush with Shadows, opens with Keira and Gage arriving at the Manor after an arduous journey from Ireland (where they’d solved the case of a murdered nun), and already things are tense. At the end of As Death Draws Near, the fifth book in Anna Lee Huber’s series of historical mysteries, the recently-wed Lady Darby and her husband, private enquiry agent Sebastian Gage, were urgently summoned to England – specifically, to Gage’s family home at Langstone Manor in Dartmoor.

A brush with shadows anna lee huber