Kate Plus 10

Michael Pretherston

Michael moves through drawing rooms and police files with equal ease, his elaborate Baker Street flat and inherited money marking him as no ordinary inspector. He first met Kate Westhanger over a vanished King's messenger's bag, and his estimate of her character has been modified but never shaken. His habit of sympathizing with the very people he hunts is the flaw that gives the investigation its strange, personal heat.

The Girl

She moves through the Flanborough household and beyond with a secretary's notebook and a gaze that misses nothing, her down-turned lips and grey eyes suggesting a sorrow she has not actually lived. Men explain things to her over and over, which is precisely the arrangement she prefers. Her true role in the theft and in Michael's investigation is the quiet engine driving the reader forward.

Sir Ralph Sapson

Sir Ralph prides himself on summing up any man before he opens his mouth, yet he cannot see that the charming woman whose car broke down outside his house was working him from the first. He comes to Michael with two confidences: a business arrangement and the suspicion that his fiancee is carrying on with another man. His vanity and his money make him both a useful pawn and a liability in the case.

Kate Westhanger

Michael first encountered her during a cross-channel case involving a King's messenger's bag, and later when the Muranic's strongroom was forced and twenty-five packets of diamonds vanished at sea. He judged her hastily at first, then revised his estimate without ever changing it. She is the criminal intelligence that gives the investigation its shape, and the personal history that gives it its sting.

Lady Moya Felton

Lady Moya employs a secretary, tolerates her father's condescension, and finds her fiance's attentions more suffocating than flattering. She meets a man in the park to sketch, a fact Sir Ralph reports to Michael with considerable agitation. Her old acquaintance with Michael Pretherston, and her cool, detached admiration of him, make her both a suspect's ally and a complication in the household where the pearls vanished.

Lord Flanborough

George Percy Allington Felton brought two million pounds and a mean temper to a title he was only remotely related to, and he has been insufferable ever since. When eighty-three graduated pearls disappear from his household, he drafts an advertisement and whittles the reward down from two hundred pounds to a vague promise. His parsimony, his suspicion of everyone beneath him, and his uneasy relationship with his daughter make the Flanborough house a hothouse of resentment.