Portrait of Peril

Portrait of Peril is the fifth book in Laura Joh Rowland's Victorian Mysteries.  She previously wrote the Sano Ichero series set in 17th century Japan.  This is the first book in the new series that I have read and I had a little trouble understanding the relationships between the characters.  It probably would have been best if I read the books in order.

The publisher's summary:

"Victorian London is a city gripped by belief in the supernatural - but a grisly murder becomes a matter of flesh and blood for intrepid photographer Sarah Bain.

London, October 1890.  Crime scene photographer Sarah Bain is overjoyed to marry her beloved Detective Sergeant Barrett - but the wedding takes a sinister turn when the body of a stabbing victim is discovered in the crypt of the church.  Not every newlywed couple begins their marriage with a murder investigation, but Sarah and Barrett, along with their friends Lord Hugh Staunton and Mick O'Reilly, take the case.  

The dead man is Charles Firth, whose profession is "spirit photography" - photographing the ghosts of the deceased.  When Sarah develops the photographs he took in the church, she discovers one with a pale, blurred figure attacking the victim.  The city's spiritualist community believes the church is haunted and the figure is a ghost. But Sarah is a skeptic, and she and her friends soon learn that the victim had plenty of enemies in the human world - including a scientist who studies supernatural phenomena, his psychic daughter, and an heiress on a campaign to debunk spiritualism and expose fraudulent mediums.

In the tunnels beneath a demolished jail, a ghost-hunting expedition ends with a new murder, and new suspects. While Sarah searches for the truth about both crimes, she travels a dark, twisted path into her own family's sordid history.  Her long lost father is he prime suspect in a cold case murder, and her reunion with him proves that even the most determined skeptic can be haunted by ghosts from the past."

I had some difficulties with the book. While it is plausible for a husband and wife detective/photographer team to investigate crimes, wife Sarah is doing most of the sleuthing.  Thomas Barrett's role is secondary. Since Sarah is a crime scene photographer for a newspaper, I would expect that her role would either be complementary or equal to her husband's role. Her role did not seem natural to me. Also, I could not believe that both Sarah and Thomas left their wedding ceremony to look into the discovery of a dead body. I can see Thomas doing some investigating since his job is a police detective but I cannot see him giving up attending his wedding breakfast and falling asleep before the marriage could be consummated. It was also hard to believe that Sarah did any investigating at all on her wedding day. She is just a newspaper photographer and has no real purpose in investigating the crime at this early stage. In addition, it was not believable that the married couple would live apart, especially Sarah's living arrangements with another man.  

The solving of the crime was interesting. The reader learns about spirit photographers, something I had never heard of before. The supernatural was not a part of the book, just the history about this common career in Victorian times. There were societies both in favor of this medium as well as opposed to it. The reader learns how these groups operated and the reasons for their beliefs. The subplot concerning Sarah's father seemed a little too farfetched given everything else that was happening. I think the author should have focused on one or two aspects of spirit photography for the plot and left the rest out or wrote it as narrative. However, the whodunnit was shocking as well as the reason for the killings.

3 out of 5 stars.