Historical Womens Mystery

Joanna and the Watsons receive an unexpected visitor to 221B Baker Street during a nocturnal storm. A rain-drenched Dr. Alexander Verner has just returned from an unsettling trip to see a patient who he believes is being held against his will. Joanna quickly realizes Verner's patient is a high-ranking Englishman who the Germans have taken captive to pry vital information about England’s military strategies for the Great War. The police are frantic to find him before the Germans can use him to decode all of England’s undeciphered messages.

Returning to her childhood home, Lady Kiera Darby hopes her beloved brother Trevor and the merriment of the Hogmanay Ball will distract her. But when a caretaker is murdered and a grave is disturbed at nearby Dryburgh Abbey, Kiera is once more thrust into the cold grasp of death. While Kiera knows that aiding in another inquiry will only further tarnish her reputation, her knowledge of anatomy could make the difference in solving the case.

Danger, excitement and love - this is how the glamorous Phryne Fisher is determined to live her life in her second enticing adventure. Walking the wings of a Tiger Moth plane in full flight ought to be enough excitement for most people, but not Phryne Fisher, amateur detective, woman of mystery, as delectable as the finest chocolate and as sharp as razor blades.

Hugh Breedlove is far from the most agreeable client private investigator Frank Malloy has ever had, but his case is impossible to refuse: his young niece, Julia, has been wrongfully committed to an insane asylum by her cruel and unfaithful husband, Chet Longly. Though Breedlove and his wife seem more interested in protecting the family reputation than their niece’s safety, Frank and Sarah agree to help for the sake of Julia and the young son she left behind. Frank and Sarah’s investigation reveals a dark secret.

In this compelling new time-slip mystery, a little girl goes missing from her family’s castle in the Thousand Islands of New York. Eighty-five years later, a journalist teams up with a woman living on Koster Isle to find out what happened to Poppy, once and for all.

Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft, owns a building in the heart of 19th-century London, a place she uses under pseudonyms to front for her investigative work. Employed there is a porter - Joddy, a young boy in a uniform festooned with buttons - whose even younger brother substitutes for him when he's sick. But Paddy disappears after one day at the job, and Enola Holmes is alerted to this by the still ill Joddy.

A classmate from Oxford University introduces Mary to Margery Childe, the charismatic spiritual leader of the New Temple of God. Curious about Margery’s popular teachings, Mary begins attending temple meetings. But when Margery’s followers—all well-bred, well-heeled young women—become targets for murder, Mary senses something sinister lurking within the walls of the temple. With Holmes at her side, she plunges headlong into the most dangerous investigation of her life.

Train enthusiast Francis Humphreys took his last breath while relatives and neighbors visited downstairs. But if everyone was downstairs, who could have stolen into Uncle Francis's study, killed him, and escaped? Mrs. Jeffries will have to lend her downstairs common sense to this upstairs murder mystery.

In this second installment of Carola Dunn's cozy mystery series set in 1923 England, plucky Daisy Dalrymple embarks on another assignment for Town and Country magazine and discovers that daffodil bulbs aren't all that's buried in a country estate's flower bed.

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.

1929: Girls are going missing in Melbourne. Little, pretty golden-haired girls. And not just pretty. Three of them are pregnant, poor girls from the harsh confines of the Magdalene Laundry. People are getting nervous. Polly Kettle, a pushy, self-important Girl Reporter with ambition and no sense of self-preservation, decides to investigate - and promptly goes missing herself. It's time for Phryne and Dot to put a stop to this and find Polly Kettle before something quite irreparable happens to all of them. It's all piracy and dark cellars, convents and plots, murder and mystery...and Phryne finally finds out if it's true that blondes have more fun.

For Emily, accepting the proposal of Philip, the viscount Ashton, was an easy way to escape her overbearing mother, who was set on a grand society match. So when Emily's dashing husband died on safari soon after their wedding, she felt little grief. After all, she barely knew him. Now, nearly two years later, she discovers that Philip was a far different man from the one she had married so cavalierly.

Unsettled with his new role in society, and being deemed one of London's most eligible bachelors, Hugh is happy to fall back on his Bow Street skills to track down Lady Redding—and to see Audrey again. But the viscountess's disappearance is only half of the puzzle. A long-lost ring worth a fortune could be the driving force behind the deadly events, and as Audrey and Hugh unravel the truth—along with the secrets and complications surrounding their future—a killer closes in on the house party . . . and selects a new victim.

Sussex, 1957: When Flora Steele and handsome crime writer Jack Carrington attend the grand re-opening of the Priory Hotel in the beautiful little village of Abbeymead, their day out is cut short when the flame-haired female singer in the band suddenly drops dead before their eyes. Flora is stunned by the unexpected turn of events and immediately deduces foul play. Beverly Russo was a spirited young woman with a big voice, and Flora is determined to get to the bottom of her untimely demise—especially as the detective sergeant leading the investigation is so hopeless.

When a fellow passenger is found dead on Audrey's packet ship from France, a mysterious note on the body points to her as the killer. Detained in Dover for an inquest that is being led by a prejudiced magistrate, she is joined by trusted friends and family—and the newly minted viscount, Hugh Marsden—to prove her innocence. But when it's discovered the murdered man was a private inquiry agent, hired to follow the duchess while she traveled the Continent, they enter a race to find out who hired him and why.

Vienna, 1954 After losing everyone she loves in the final days of World War II, Ingrid Bauer agrees to a hasty marriage with a gentle Soviet embassy worker and follows him home to Moscow. But nothing within the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime is what it seems, including her new husband, whom Ingrid suspects works for the KGB. Inspired by her daughter’s birth, Ingrid risks everything and reaches out in hope to the one country she understands and trusts—Britain, the country of her mother’s birth. She begins passing intelligence to MI6, navigating a world of secrets and lies, light and shadow.

When Darcy runs off on another secret assignment, I am left to figure out how to travel to Italy sans maid and chaperone to help my dear friend Belinda, as she awaits the birth of her baby alone. An opportunity presents itself in a most unexpected way - my cousin the queen is in need of a spy to attend a house party in the Italian lake country. The Prince of Wales and the dreadful Mrs. Simpson have been invited, and Her Majesty is anxious to thwart a possible secret wedding.

Irish immigrant and private detective Molly Murphy is thrilled to have a ticket to see world-famous illusionist Harry Houdini. But before he can even take the stage, the opening act goes horribly wrong—and the sensational Signor Scarpelli’s lovely assistant is sawed in half. In the aftermath, Scarpelli accuses Houdini of tampering with his equipment. Who else but the so-called Handcuff King could have got a hold of his trunk of tricks, which he keeps under lock and key?

India, 1922: Bombay’s only female solicitor Perveen Mistry is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women’s hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire—but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly putting herself in harm’s way. Later, Perveen learns that Sunanda, who’s still ailing from her burns, has been arrested on trumped-up charges made by a man who doesn’t seem to exist.

In the west end of London, an apparently crazed individual is on the loose, breaking into art galleries and private homes to slash valuable paintings of women. Despite Scotland Yard's best efforts, the criminal remains at large and continues on his destructive path. When Joanna and the Watsons are called in to solve the mystery, they soon discover that although the canvases have been slashed, their backings remain pristine, with no cuts or scratches. The criminal, it seems, is no mere vandal - he's searching for something hidden behind the portraits.