Showing results by author "Cora Harrison" in All Categories

When Inspector Field shows his friend Charles Dickens the body of a young woman dragged from the River Thames, he cannot have foreseen that the famous author would immediately recognise the victim as Isabella Gordon, a housemaid he had tried to help through his charity.

A dead body washed up after a flood dressed in evening finery is not a sight often seen in the slums of Cork city, Ireland. When Reverend Mother Aquinas discovers the body at the gate of the convent chapel she teams up with former pupil, Police Sergeant Patrick Cashman and Dr Sher, a physician and friend to find out who the woman was - and who killed her.

March, 1859. After the “Great Stink” of the previous summer when Parliament was overwhelmed by the stench of sewage from the River Thames, and with cholera running rife throughout the city, Charles Dickens has a new enthusiasm. Having formed a firm friendship with Joseph Bazalgette, he is assisting the ambitious young engineer in his efforts to find a solution to London's pollution problem.

August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyons. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the center of the stage, shot to death.

November 1853. Inspector Field has summoned his friends Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to examine a body found in an attic studio, its throat cut. Around the body lie the lacerated fragments of canvas of a painting titled A Winter of Despair. Wilkie realises he recognises the victim, for he had been due to dine with him that very evening. The dead man is Edwin Milton-Hayes, one of Wilkie's brother Charley's artist friends. With his own brother under suspicion of murder, what secrets lie among the close-knit group of Pre-Raphaelite painters who is the killer in their midst?

When 15-year-old Jane Austen’s shy cousin Jenny comes to stay, their evenings are a blur of beautiful dresses, balls, gossip, and romance; their days are spend writing about them - Jenny in her diary, Jane in her witty first attempts at fiction. When Jenny falls utterly in love with a handsome naval officer, who better to help her than Jane herself, already an expert in love and relationships?