Historical Fiction Cozy Mystery

For holidaymakers it’s a glorious time of breathtaking scenery, picnics on beaches, and flocks of tourists on their summertime holidays. But for Miss Judy Dimont, this is all a trifle dull. As a reporter for local rag, The Riviera Express, she needs scandal and intrigue - and one morning, as the clock strikes the quarter hour, she gets it. A woman has been shot dead in one of Buntorama’s upmarket holiday huts, the toffee-nosed rival hotelier next door is rubbing his hands with glee, and Judy and her trusty moped, Herbert, are off like a shot to survey the scene of the crime.

Christmas should be the happiest time, but at Pennington’s dramas are seething beneath the surface. For Cornelia Culford, a divorce hearing looms where she could lose custody of her sons to her unfaithful husband. For Stephen Gower, being head of security at Pennington's is the perfect refuge from a tragic past at Scotland Yard. But soon Joseph Carter and Elizabeth Pennington beg him to help solve the murder of Joseph's first wife, now that the killer has struck again.

Greece, 545 BC: It is illegal to die on the sacred isle of Delos. It's also illegal to give birth there. Yet when murder is committed, the only available detective to solve the crime is the priestess Diotima, and she is heavily pregnant.

Adventszeit 1881. Im Stadtgraben von Nürnberg wird ein Junge tot aufgefunden. Im Mund entdeckt die Polizei ein Stückchen Lebkuchen. Wenig später wird der Ratsherr Jakobus Ehrenhoff am Henkersteg aufgeknüpft. Um seinen Hals baumelt der Rest eines vergifteten Lebkuchenherzens. Pistoux scheint der rechte Mann an der rechten Stelle zu sein, denn die Ermittlungen drehen sich im Kreis und der in einer stadtbekannten Zuckerbäckerei arbeitende Meisterkoch kennt sich aus mit dem Gebäck.

When Lorry Lockharte’s cousin, Kasey, is accused of murder, Lorry feels like once again she must work to find the murderer. Did Kasey do it, or is she truly innocent as she claims? Lorry isn’t so sure about this one. Not only did Kasey have the opportunity and the motive, but she picked up the murder weapon. Will Lorry find the murderer only to discover that it really is Kasey?

When wealthy Lionel Furthingale’s daughter disappeared 25 years ago, she was assumed dead, a traceless disembodied victim of the Resurrection Men. Furthingale has now learned from a note scribbled on a playbill that his daughter not only lived an unknown number of years, but she gave birth before dying. Detective Morgan Bateman and his bluestocking assistant Victoria Eubank must race to find missing granddaughter Priscilla before the Drury Lane murderer corrects the mistake.

A large group of people enters the Rutledge Historical Society to see the new and much anticipated 1950s murder exhibit. After viewing the display, the group exits the building leaving two people behind. A few minutes later, one of the two is shot dead in front of the exhibit and the other one rushes out the back door and escapes. Was the perpetrator one of the group or was it the old woman’s daughter who has only a very weak (and stinky) alibi? Or could it have been someone else?

When Sidney Grice journeys to Yorkshire to solve a mysterious death, March Middleton, his ward, is left to her own devices in a London swarming with danger and vice. Curiosity, as we know, has a dark edge. So when an intriguing letter leads March to the gates of the palatial Saturn Villa and into the nightmarish world of her long-lost uncle, it could be the beginning of an end for all.

A modern woman in 1907, Lady Dunbridge is not about to let a little thing like the death of her husband ruin her social life. She's ready to take the dazzling world of Gilded Age Manhattan by storm. From the decadence of high society balls to the underbelly of Belmont horse racing, romance, murder, and scandals abound. Someone simply must do something. And Lady Dunbridge is happy to oblige.

Adelaide Willowby is having a bad day. It’s a week before Christmas, and she has just kicked out the love of her life. Her sister and her daughter are barely speaking to her, one of her best girls is getting married, and ownership of the Wylder County Social Club is in jeopardy. Now she has landed in jail—for murder.

It is the dawn of the Second World War, but life in the small town of Fielding carries on in its uncomplicated way. For young Eva, life is about to change, as her dearest friend Annie vanishes and people claim to have never known her at all. Desperate to find her, Eva befriends two strangers: the eccentric Lola, and tender but distant Gabe. The two open her eyes to a hidden world, in which people can disappear and all memory of them be forgotten.

Dedicating a monument to an eminent member of a Cambridge college should be a simple matter of course, but despite already commissioning an artist to complete the work, the meddling daughter of the deceased is determined to enlist her own sculptor to create the statue. It's convenient for her, then, when the university's chosen candidate turns up dead...Felix Smythe and Professor Cedric Dillworthy, a benefactor to the project, are invited to Cambridge to participate in the preparations. Unbeknownst to them, Rosy Gilchrist is also there, attending a reunion at Newnham College.

Mabs Millett is the reluctant heiress to Cheadle Abbey, one of Vanbrugh's monstrous piles. At a deb dance in the early fifties, she meets a financier who offers her a job as an assistant to the editor of the social diary on a magazine he has just bought.

Just after 4 pm on September 6, 1901, 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz pumped two shots into the chest and abdomen of President William McKinley. Czolgosz had been on a receiving line waiting to shake the president’s hand, his revolver concealed in an oversized bandage covering his right hand and wrist. McKinley had two Secret Service agents by his side, but neither made a move to stop the assailant. After he was apprehended, Czolgosz said simply, “I done my duty.”

Etwas Unglaubliches ist passiert! Aus einem Beinhaus wurden doch tatsächlich Schädel und Knochen gestohlen. Die Kölner Bürger sind über diesen gottlosen Frevel empört. Nur kurze Zeit später wird im Hinterhof von Adelina eine schwangere Frau getötet. Medicus Neklas Burka, der Ehemann der Apothekerin, wird direkt verdächtigt, da geglaubt wird, er habe die Schwangere für seine Experimente missbraucht. Adelina setzt es sich in den Kopf seine Unschuld zu beweisen. Aber als sie kurz darauf Schädel und Knochen in einem geheimen Raum in ihrem eigenen Keller entdeckt, kommt auch ihr Zweifel.

Als die junge Apothekerin Adelina das Zunfthaus besucht, entdeckt sie die schwer zugerichtete Leiche einer jungen Frau. Nur eine kurze Zeit später hört sie, dass der Verlobte der Toten, ein Zunftmeister, verschwunden ist. Es wird zunächst von einer Tat aus Eifersucht ausgegangen, doch kurz darauf wird er ebenfalls tot aufgefunden. Doch Adelina hat weitaus persönlichere Probleme im Kopf, als diesen Fall - bis plötzlich Münzen bei ihr auftauchen. Diese entstammen dem Bestechungsgeld der Patrizier, was zur Folge hat, dass Adelina in Verdacht gerät die Stadt Köln verraten zu haben!

A historical novel about smugglers set on Mersea Island in the 17th century inspired by a series of seances held by the Allingham family while on holiday on Mersea. Margery Allingham was born in Ealing, London, in 1904, to a family immersed in literature. Her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, was published in 1923, when she was 19. Her first work of detective fiction was a serialized story published by the Daily Express in 1927. Entitled The White Cottage Mystery, it contained atypical themes for a woman writer of the era.

An exotic mystery set in 11th-century Japan....Akitada is on his way to the bedside of his dying mother when bad weather forces him to take refuge in a temple whose central treasure is a brilliantly painted hell screen. Perhaps its violent imagery influences his dreams: that night he is awakened by a terrible scream.

It's only after Akitada returns to his family and a scene of domestic unhappiness and scandal that the significance of that cry becomes clear.

Five years after the war, Amie Stilwell, a photo interpreter for an Allied unit in England, returns to her hometown in Maine. Jobless and discouraged but stubbornly resourceful, she’s starting over in the same coastal village where her life once went so wrong. Waiting for her is Shibby Travis, the surrogate mother with whom Amie never lost touch. But the unexpected also awaits…

When Lady Emma Percival's father dies, leaving her penniless and alone, she fears that she will end up on the streets. Help is at hand, albeit from an unlikely source, when it transpires that her father has appointed his greatest enemy to be her guardian. The Duke of Liscarroll is a cold-hearted brute whom Emma spars with at every turn, but soon their angry altercations turn to something else entirely....