Historical Fiction Cozy Mystery

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.

Weihnachtlicher Cosy Crime aus der Kaiserzeit. Wien, 1910. Wenige Tage vor Heiligabend wird Tabakfabrikant Steinhäusel in seinem luxuriösen Stadtpalais tot aufgefunden. Die Todesursache bleibt ein Rätsel – sowohl für den Leibarzt der Industriellenfamilie als auch für diese selbst, die noch am Vorabend mit Steinhäusel zusammengekommen war. Kommissar Felix Zack übernimmt die Ermittlungen und stellt schnell fest, dass in dieser Familie beinahe jeder ein Motiv hat – zu seinem Leidwesen auch die böhmische Köchin Mila, die ihn nicht nur mit ihren Köstlichkeiten verzaubert.

Works by best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert have been nominated for the Agatha and Anthony awards. In The Tale of Oat Cake Crag, Miss Beatrix Potter is frustrated by distractions near her home. As the noisy test flights of a hydroplane disrupt her concentration, Beatrix investigates a string of bizarre letters threatening a friend’s reputation. Then life becomes even more complicated when the body of the hydroplane project funder is found at the foot of Oat Cake Crag.

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....

Daisy Gumm Majesty, spiritualist to folks with more money than sense, can scarcely believe that her best client wants her to get her spiritual control, Rolly, to appear at a séance in a speakeasy. Bad enough that Daisy made up Rolly when she was ten, but now Rolly has to perform at a séance for a bunch of murdering gangsters?

Set in Pasadena, California, in the 1920s, this fresh, funny romance follows the exploits and adventures of a medium who caters to the rich and famous... and puts the “con” in conjurer!

Esme Quentin is devastated when her sister Elizabeth is assaulted and left unconscious, miles from her home. Two days later Esme discovers that Elizabeth has a secret past. Desperate for answers which the comatose Elizabeth cannot give, Esme enlists the help of her friend Lucy to search for the truth, unaware of the dangerous path she is treading. Together they unravel a tangle of bitterness, blackmail, and dubious inheritance, and as the harrowing story is finally revealed, Esme stumbles upon evidence of a pitiful crime.

Egypt, 1914. It is the beginning of the war and Gareth Owen, Mamur Zapt and Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, is given the unhappy task of rounding up enemy aliens. But, in a land where adoption of foreign nationality is a popular means of avoiding trial by an Egyptian court, determining who counts as German proves contentious. And then there’s the face in the cemetery.

Investigative reporter Sam Hawke, alias Mrs. Samantha Rosenbaum, is the first on the scene—what luck!—when a body is found in the yard of St. Stephen’s Church on Hanover Street in Boston. Dr. Haley Higgins, the assistant Chief Medical Examiner, finds the modus operandi of the crime eerily familiar to that of her brother’s, an unsolved murder that has plagued her for years.

In a bid to heal from the grief of a personal loss, forensic genealogist RaeJean Hunter takes on a straightforward case-identify human remains found on a nearby college campus, believed to be the 180-year-old remains of Mary Rogers, a woman who died mysteriously in 1841 and was believed to have been buried in the nearby cemetery that had washed away. It should be simple enough, a project to get her back in the game.

Left with only a muddle-headed butler, a bossy cook/housekeeper, and a couple of energetic maids, Lady Elizabeth Hartleigh Compton has enough problems on her hands. Not only is she struggling to upkeep the sprawling Manor House and vast acres she inherited, she must also take care of her numerous tenants, while coping with the inconveniences and sacrifices of wartime England. Fortunately Sitting Marsh is far removed from the bombing going on in London and other cities. That doesn't mean that peace prevails in the tiny village.

Left with only a muddle-headed butler, a bossy cook/housekeeper, and a couple of energetic maids, Lady Elizabeth Hartleigh Compton has enough problems on her hands. Not only is she struggling to upkeep the sprawling Manor House and vast acres she inherited, she must also take care of her numerous tenants, while coping with the inconveniences and sacrifices of wartime England.