A student has vanished from Oxford, Lennox’s alma mater, and Lenox is asked to find him.

Lady Annabelle Payson shows up at late hours on Lenox’s front step. She wants Lenox’s help. She tells him there is a dead cat in her son’s rooms at college. That is not the main reason for her request of help. Her son has disappeared and she wants Lenox to go with her to Oxford to find her son.

Lenox finds George Payson’s disappearance is tied to a group called The September Society. Payson’s father, the father’s military history and the father’s death some years back are also tied to the September Society. Lenox must find the common thread and untangle it in hopes of finding the boy…alive or dead.

The murdered cat and a card referring to The September Society are just two of the strange clues Lenox discovers and must translate to solve the mystery. The layers to this case and the assortment of characters along to the ties to the past kept me reading to the final solution. ( )

An improvement from the first in the series, although the writing is still awkward and repetitive in places. ( )

The September Society is a historical mystery that takes place in Oxford and London in Autumn 1866. It is the second novel in a series that features amateur sleuth Charles Lenox. It was published in 2008.

The publisher's summary:

"In the small hours of the morning one fall day in 1866, a frantic widow visits detective Charles Lenox. Lady Annabelle's problem is simple: Her beloved son, George, has vanished from his room at Oxford. When Lenox visits his alma mater to investigate he discovers a series of bizarre clues, including a murdered cat and a card cryptically referring to The September Society. Then, just as Lenox realizes that the case may be deeper than it appears, a student dies, the victim of foul play."
This was light reading at its best. While light, the book had all the features of a perfectly plotted mystery. There were lots of twists as the resolution of the murder was slowly revealed. The whydunnit held most of the mystery than either the whodunnit or howdunnit. We really don't know what the September Society is until the last pages, which was a satisfying way to end the story.

I liked the Oxford collegiate setting. I am not that familiar with Oxford and went back and forth between the story and a map of Oxford itself. If future books in the series take place here I will be reading all of them. I also liked the London setting in the Victorian era. While I am familiar with London today, it was good to read about it from another time period. Learning about these two places was an enjoyable part of the reading experience.

The September Society is the quintessential British fiction novel. Much of the action takes place in pubs and private gentleman clubs. Many of the characters belong to four or five gentleman clubs and each of them have a different character to them. The main character Charles Lenox is quirky, as we Americans call this type of character. He bumbles when it comes to romance with the opposite sex and thinks way too much about what is the right thing to do. His language is more British English than American English. I enjoy a good British yarn! ( )

This is the second in the series of Victorian detective novels featuring Charles Lenox, a 40ish man who had always thought to follow his grandfather, father and brother into Parliament, but somehow hasn't got 'round to standing for a seat so far. He's come to accept that sleuthing suits him, and that perhaps he should really consider proposing to his dearest and oldest friend, Lady Jane Grey. In the midst of an increasingly alarming missing persons case, however, the moment never feels quite right and he may have left it too long... I remember reading the first Lenox outing, A Beautiful Blue Death, and thinking this is a series with great promise, love the characters and the setting, and here's a gentleman doing what Sherlock Holmes claimed to have invented, some 30 years earlier and without the benefit of that 7% solution. The second entry in the series is even better than I expected. Set mainly among the colleges of Oxford, this is not just a grand mystery, but also a fine bit of historical fiction. I'm well and truly hooked now. Review written in 2017 ( )

3.5 stars ( )