Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mysteries

Sooty, sulfurous, and malign: no woman should be out on a night like this. A spate of violent deaths—the details too foul to print—has horrified the capital and the smog-bound streets are deserted. But Rachel Savernake—the enigmatic daughter of a notorious hanging judge—is no ordinary woman. To Scotland Yard's embarrassment, she solved the Chorus Girl Murder, and now she's on the trail of another killer.

A chilling encounter on London's Necropolis Railway leads to murder, and a man escapes the gallows after a witness gives sensational evidence. After this string of strange, fatal events, journalist Jacob Flint discovers that he has been framed for murder. To save himself, he flees to Mortmain Hall, a remote estate on the northern coast. There, an eccentric female criminologist hosts a gathering of eclectic people who have all escaped miscarriages of cruel justice. This strange group puts Jacob a little on edge, but they may be his only hope to clear his name.

Yorkshire, 1606. A man vanishes from a locked gatehouse in a remote village. 300 years later, it happens again. Autumn 1930. Journalist Nell Fagan knows there's only one person who can get to the bottom of this mystery: Rachael Savernake. But someone wants Nell dead, and soon, while investigating a series of recent deaths at Blackstone Sanatorium, she's missing entirely. Looking for answers, Rachel travels to lonely Blackstone Fell, with its eerie moor, deadly waters and sinister tower.

1930. Nell Fagan is a journalist on the trail of an intriguing and bizarre mystery: in 1606, a man vanished from a locked gatehouse in a remote Yorkshire village, and 300 years later, it happened again. Nell confides in the best sleuth she knows, judge's daughter Rachel Savernake. Thank goodness she did, because barely a week later Nell disappears, Rachel is left to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

The woman in white—surreal artist Damaris Gethin—has invited a select group to the opening of her exhibit Artist in Crime, held in the eerie subterranean Hades Gallery. As costumed models reenact famously violent deaths, the artist herself portrays Marie Antoinette on the day of her execution, complete with a guillotine on the stage. It's not a prop; within ten minutes of Rachel's promise to solve Damaris's future murder, the artist slips her neck into the collar of the device and the very real blade sends her head rolling at the feet of her horrified audience.

Basil Palmer has decided to murder a man called Louis Carson. There’s only one problem: he doesn’t know anything about his intended victim, not who he is or where he lives. Basil learns that Carson owns Hemlock Bay, a resort for the wealthy and privileged. Knowing that his plan will only work if he covers his tracks, he invents a false identity and, posing as Dr Seamus Doyle, journeys to the coast plotting murder along the way.