Tempest in the Tea Room (Jewish Regency Mystery Series Book 1)

Solid 'meh.'The concept is lovely, but the execution left something to be desired. The multiple plots don't quite hang together and the culprit in the main mystery was painfully obvious. Most of the characters are fairly flat, and the Judaism of the characters and the community was heavy-handed without adding much texture. For example, five mentions of a particular coffeehouse as a "kosher establishment" in such a short space are too much, doing nothing to impart new information to the reader, j

Tempest in the Tea Room is an entertaining read--a mystery set in London in the early 1800's, and written in a style that captures the flavor (or should I say "flavour") of the time. Replete with well-researched historical details and colorful characters, the book takes the reader into the heart of the Regency era Jewish community. While the reader has all the clues as to "whodunit" long before the characters in the story, the quest for answers reveals schemes within schemes. The story is told w

Ezra Melamed is a Jewish detective in London of the 1800s. In Libi Astaire’s Tempest in the Tea Room, Melamed must discover why otherwise healthy orphans are becoming deathly ill. In this tale, set against the backdrop of London’s Jewish community, complete with jealousy, revenge, unrequited love, and snobbish pretensions, we meet a character who is understated, and at the same time, larger than life.Astaire does a deft job of describing the social milieu in which a cast of interesting character