Historical Detective Mystery

Though forty miles away, Duston Heights is not safe from the flu that’s raging through Boston. When Johnny Dixon’s grandmother falls ill, he’s sent to live with his neighbor to avoid infection. So many locals are getting sick that school is canceled for a week, and the reclusive Dr. Abram Ashburn comes out of retirement to make house calls. After seeing a scary vision of his bedridden grandmother outside of a window, Johnny starts to feel on edge. Then he and his best friend find what looks to be a weird map of a cemetery in Dr. Ashburn’s house.

It’s 1890 and the newly famous Sherlock Holmes faces his worst adversary to date - a diabolical villain bent on destroying some of London’s most admired public figures in particularly gruesome ways. A further puzzle is that suicide closely attends each of the murders. As he tracks the killer through vast and seething London, Holmes finds himself battling both an envious Scotland Yard and a critical press as he follows a complex trail from performers to princes, anarchists to aesthetes.

Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer’s dream has come true: The Sherlock Holmes-worshiping cowboy brothers are finally in business as professional detectives. But their fledgling A.A. Western Detective Agency faces a few challenges. Their partner, Col. Crowe, is almost as cantankerous and secretive as Old Red himself. The colonel’s daughter, Diana, insists on tagging along for the Amlingmeyers’ first assignment, which lands them smack dab in the middle of a range war - with Big Red and Old Red expected to shoot it out with rustlers rather than rustle up clues and solve a mystery.

Eccentric Annabeth Gentry pretty much keeps to herself. Besides her recent inheritance - and the attention her bloodhound gets for digging up the body of a murdered thief - her life is in fact, rather dull. So why does she think that someone is trying to kill her? That's what Mrs. Jeffries and her staff has to find out. What they discover is a dead body next door, and three attempts on Annabeth's life. It sounds like there's a jealous dog in their midst. Mrs. Jeffries will have to sniff out some clues before the plot thickens....

Published in January 1922, The Secret Adversary is the second detective fiction novel by British crime novelist Agatha Christie. The book introduces the characters of Tommy Beresford and Prudence Tuppence Cowley, two out-of-work 20-somethings in post-war London. The two agree to form The Young Adventurers, Ltd, hiring themselves out with the slogan no reasonable offer refused. They are quickly enlisted to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young woman who was entrusted with sensitive diplomatic documents amid the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

When one of his cats accidentally discovers a rare Victory Disc, the Vinyl Detective and his girlfriend, Nevada, are whisked into the world of big band swing music and a mystery that began during the Second World War. Hired to track down the rest of the highly sought-after recordings of the Flare Path Orchestra, our hero will discover that the battles of the last world war aren’t over yet. And if all this sounds simple, it’s only because we haven’t mentioned drive-by shootings, murderous neo-Nazis, or that slight case of being buried alive....

During the height of the Great War, playboy Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, vanishes in thin air while horseback riding in Hyde Park The strikingly handsome playboy prince is initially believed to have arranged his disappearance so he can enjoy a brief rendezvous with one of his secret lovers. But when his absence continues on for days, the royal family grows concerned and summons Scotland Yard, who can only recover scant, unrevealing clues.

1930: Miss Clara Vale, chemistry major turned detective, is taking a night off from sleuthing to attend the launch party of a new exhibition at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. But when the piece de resistance, a rare ornate sarcophagus, is finally opened and it turns out the mummy inside it is a fake it looks like there is no rest for Clara after all... Later that night, she is summoned back to the museum and asked to investigate a series of stolen Egyptian artefacts.

December 1941. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill arrives in Washington, D.C., along with special agent Maggie Hope. Posing as his typist, she is accompanying the prime minister as he meets with President Roosevelt to negotiate the United States’ entry into World War II. When one of the First Lady’s aides is mysteriously murdered, Maggie is quickly drawn into Mrs. Roosevelt’s inner circle—as ER herself is implicated in the crime.

Maurice Leblanc, a writer of detective fiction during the same period as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, created Arsene Lupin, a sort of French Robin Hood. An inventive genius, a master of disguise, and an accomplished actor, Lupin operates in the choice chateaux and salons. He scorns sham and with great disdain leaves his card in a baron's residence. The card reads, "Arsene Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine."

At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher bearers find an exhausted officer shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is the officer isn't British - he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.

It’s 1876, and Charles Lenox has just given up his seat in Parliament after six years, primed to return to his first love, detection. With high hopes he and three colleagues start a new detective agency, the first of its kind. But as the months pass, and he is the only detective who cannot find work, Lenox begins to question whether he can still play the game as he once did.Then comes a chance to redeem himself, though at a terrible price: a friend, a member of Scotland Yard, is shot near Regent’s Park.

LOS ANGELES, 1932: Lulu Wong, star of the silver screen and the pride of Chinatown, has a face known to practically everyone, especially the Chow sisters—May, Gemma, and Peony—Lulu’s former classmates and neighbors. So the girls instantly know it’s Lulu when they discover a body one morning in an out-of-the-way stable, far from the Beverly Hills home where she lived after her fame skyrocketed. The sisters suspect Lulu’s death is the result of foul play, but the police don’t seem motivated to investigate. Even worse, there are signs that point to a cover-up.

Spring, 1858. The route of the Caledonian Railway through the southern uplands of the Scottish countryside is disrupted by a fatal crash. Inspector Robert Colbeck and Sergeant Victor Leeming are called from the crime of London to investigate, and must contend with old enemy Superintendent Rory McTurk to uncover the criminals behind the disaster.

Rosemary Simpson presents Book 8 in the Gilded Age Mystery series.

Returning from a continental honeymoon with his new wife, Lady Jane, Lenox is asked by a colleague in Parliament to consult in the murder of a footman, bludgeoned to death with a brick. His investigation uncovers some unsettling facts about the family he served and a strange, second identity that the footman himself cultivated.Going into the boxing clubs and public houses, the Mayfair mansions and servants' quarters of Victorian London, Lenox gradually realizes that an old friend may be implicated in the footman's death. Soon a suspect is arrested, but Lenox has his doubts.

It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody.

It's June 1814, and the royal families of Austria, Russia, and the German states have gathered in London at the Prince Regent's invitation to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of monarchical control throughout Europe. But the festive atmosphere is marred one warm summer evening by the brutal murder of a disgraced British nobleman long thought dead.

On the north coast of Cornwall, an apparent act of mercy is repaid by an arrest for murder. Four young women have been accused of the crime. A shocked father calls in a favor at the Home Office. Scotland Yard is asked to review the case.

However, Inspector Ian Rutledge is not the first inspector to reach the village. Following in the shoes of a dead man, he is told the case is all but closed.

As a mute, burly German peasant is helping British soldiers move a fallen tree, he's struck on the head. When he regains consciousness he calls out to the astonished Major Manning, using his nickname "Monkey"—in perfect English.