It's 1910, and Sandor Seymour of Special Branch has been sent to Trieste by the Foreign Office to investigate the disappearance of the British Consul, Lomax. Seymour is a policeman, not a politician, and he feels like a fish out of water in the highly political environment of Trieste. He's undercover as a King's Messenger, so he can't be seen to go about an investigation in the way a policeman would. The more he finds out about Lomax, the more complicated his disappearance begins to seem. Seymour encounters artists, socialists, students, revolutionaries, striking workers, sailors, immigrants, Italians, Austrians, Serbs, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and the secret police.

The setting and the political climate kept me reading despite some obvious weaknesses. Chronological errors or inconsistencies get under my skin, and this book has some big ones. There's no question that this book is set within four years of the start of the first World War. Seymour's age is never given, but his thoughts are those of a young man. He's still reflecting on his career choice, and his grandfather is still living. He tells another character that his grandfather immigrated in the early 1850s and that he and his father were both born in England. Later in the book, something reminds him of the Ripper case he had been assigned to a few years earlier. Jack the Ripper was active in 1888, so Seymour was either working a cold case or he became a policeman and was assigned to a high profile case while still in his teens. The book's immigrant theme seemed timely given the current political conversations in the U.S. Recommended with reservations. ( )

Easy read, engaging story. Ignore the book jacket, book set in 1910. ( )