Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn

The fourth Julia Grey book kicks off a little over 8 months after Julia and Nicholas Brisbane have married, with Julia and her siblings, Portia and Plum, in India to visit Portia’s former lover, Jane, whose husband recently died. Though Jane hasn’t said so, Portia suspects that Jane’s husband was murdered, possibly for his estate, and so she’s worried about Jane’s safety, especially since Jane is pregnant. Julia, while concerned for Jane, is also annoyed because Brisbane stayed behind in Calcutta for reasons he wouldn’t divulge.

The bulk of the book is taken up with Julia trying to determine if there really is a murder to solve, and later her and Brisbane trying to figure out how to be both business and marriage partners. There’s one thing regarding Brisbane and his business that we learn that Julia and I both took pretty badly, and which she ended up being way more forgiving of than me. But then, only one of us is in love with him, and it isn’t me. Objectively, makes perfect sense, given the era, but it makes me suspicious of Brisbane ever really being able to see her as a partner. There’s also a lot of colonialism. A lot. There’s also a fair bit of criticism of colonialism, both from Julia and from the narrative itself, and all groups are developed and treated with respect, but it’s still a “white Europeans in exotic India” book. Having read three previous books and being attached to the characters and ongoing plot kept this from affecting my enjoyment much, but others may disagree, or have more problems with it (and probably will with very intelligent and thought out posts, at some point).

Like Raybourn’s other books, the writing and characterization are excellent, and it plays with some genre tropes while sniffing disdainfully at others. I figured out what was going on pretty early on, but I’m not sure if that’s because it was easy to figure out despite not being a common Reveal at all, or if it’s just that my making a theory out of an absurd stray thought tends to pan out. No, really. There’s one canon where 2 teenaged girls were fixing their makeup in the school bathroom, and I decided that they were Secretly Sisters because they had similar coloring and near-identical hair. And 2 seasons later, they were half-sisters!