Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Mystery #2)
Lucinda Brant

Alec's foreboding deepens when a nobody vicar drops dead at a party-political dinner; he witnesses the very public humiliation of an up and coming portrait painter, and his rabble-rousing uncle Plantagenet is bashed and left for dead in a laneway. When the vicar's true identity is revealed, Alec suspects the man was poisoned. But who would want a seemingly harmless man of God murdered, and why?
Book 2 in the Alec Halsey Crimance series