One of a series of mysteries with te 4 musketters as detectives. Reasonable since Dumas himself wrote stories in which D'Artagnan acted as a detective

#3 in the “Musketeers” historical mystery series featuring the main characters from Alexandre Dumas’ classic swashbuckling tale. I realized once I was several chapters into the book that I had read this out of sequence—having not read the second one yet. By then it was too late to stop. LOL

In this episode, Porthos’ young apprentice dueler is killed, found in an alley incoherent and hallucinating and then has a seizure and dies in Porthos’ presence. Porthos believes he was poisoned and his Musketeer friends concur thinking belladonna is the likely culprit. When they find information about Porthos’ ancestry in his pockets—information that is supposedly unknown but that in reality is an open secret, they feel that the boy (he was only twelve!) was manipulated and used to get to Porthos, and the foursome sets out to figure out who would do such a thing—and of course their investigations are sure to rattle some highly-placed noble cages! But the first chore is to find out who the boy really was so his family can be notified of his demise, as he hadn’t given Porthos much in the way of clues and no one recognized the name given by the boy.

I found this book somewhat tedious. The first in the series was unique and interesting, but this one…I don’t know. Maybe it was just too many “main characters”—there were all four musketeers in their ‘secret’ guises as well as their real identities to keep straight, and I kept getting them mixed up. There were also a lot of peripheral characters, servants, mistresses, etc. involved, and the author kept referring back to the first two books in the series with footnotes and details of other cases. The writing style also just didn’t flow easily and I found myself having to re-read a lot of passages. I finished this book, but won't bother going back to read the second one, nor will I be continuing on in the series. ( )