Paulina M.

Twelve years ago, eight friends ran an exclusive group at university: The Masquerade Murder Society. The mysteries they solved may have been grisly, but they were always fictional - until their final Christmas Masquerade, when one of the group disappeared, never to be seen again. Twelve years later, the remaining members of the group receive an invitation to a reunion masquerade, to be held in a beautiful and remote hunting lodge in Scotland. When they arrive they are each assigned a new identity themed around the Twelve Days of Christmas.

On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought.

Lady Emily Hardcastle is an eccentric widow with a secret past. Florence Armstrong, her maid and confidante, is an expert in martial arts. The year is 1908 and they've just moved from London to the country, hoping for a quiet life. But it is not long before Lady Hardcastle is forced out of her self-imposed retirement. There's a dead body in the woods, and the police are on the wrong scent. Lady Hardcastle makes some enquiries of her own, and it seems she knows a surprising amount about crime investigation...