Historical Women Detectives

Penrose and Pyke must put aside their own problems in a race against the clock to rescue a kidnapped infant. When private detective Charlie Penrose Pyke is asked to investigate the kidnapping of a child, his instinct is to refuse. As their first wedding anniversary approaches, Charlie fears for the fragile state of his wife, Grace, for whom this heart-breaking case could be the final straw. But how can he let the desperate parents down, when they have struggled for years to conceive only to have their baby snatched away? Besides, Charlie is their only hope, because the ransom note threatens...

It's early 1957, and Rosa Reed and her new beau Detective Miguel Belmonte fly from California to London to follow up on a cold case: the murder of Rosa's good friend Lady Vivien Everleigh. The investigation is complicated, if not awkward, as the deceased is the sister of Rosa's former fiancé. Thankfully, Rosa's parents, Ginger (aka Ginger Gold of Lady Gold Investigations) and Basil Reed are there to help. Rosa stumbles onto a dangerous truth. Can she find her friend's killer and save her own life too?

Charlotte Pitt’s mother, Caroline, travels with her young husband, Joshua Fielding, and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, where Dracula first touched English soil. Joshua has arranged to produce a stage adaptation of Dracula by the daughter of Whitby millionaire Charles Netheridge, but the amateurish script produces a disastrous first read-through. As tempers flare and wind and snow swirl around Netheridge’s lonely hilltop mansion, a black-cloaked stranger emerges from the storm - an eerily opportune arrival, for this enigmatic figure, one Anton Ballin, turns out to be a theatrical genius.

On his death bed, Lord Pembroke took great care to try to ensure the future of his beautiful, unconventional niece, Lady Jane. Her debutante ball featured the most eligible bachelors of London society. But when the night of the dance arrives, things do not go as planned.

An explosion and fire at the Ashton Gunpowder Mill in Kent has killed over a hundred men. It's called an appalling tragedy - until suspicion and rumor raise the specter of murder. While visiting the Ashton family, Bess Crawford finds herself caught up in a venomous show of hostility that doesn't stop with Philip Ashton's arrest. Indeed, someone is out for blood, and the household is all but under siege.

Christmas at a snowed in country house. You know what happens next… Not necessarily. Agatha Aston is invited to spend the weekend before Christmas with some old friends. Accompanied by her Machiavellian Basset hound, Talleyrand, Agatha encounters murder, ghosts and romance at a country house where nothing is as it seems. While Agatha has her hands full solving a murder, Talleyrand has his own problems in the shape of Bismarck, the hosts’ unfriendly German Shepherd. Expect fireworks. Containing a short ghost story within a story, The Christmas Murder Mystery is a twisty box of delights, ...

Death Disease Dreadful work conditions A sequence of problems plagues Poppy Elgin, who arrives in England from Australia in the midst of the Spanish influenza outbreak. The Great War is over; her troubles are just starting. Will no one come to her aid? It's 1919 and women are cropping their hair, shortening their skirts, widening their horizons. Will Poppy ever really be an independent woman? Could a new friend be the solution? Petals & Pages is the heart-warming story of two friends whose valiant attempts at becoming independent women are thwarted at every step.

Jane discovers holiday cheer is fleeting. One of the Yuletide gathering dies in a tragic accident whose circumstances Jane immediately views with suspicion. If the accident was in fact murder, the killer is one of Jane's fellow snowbound guests. With clues scattered amid cleverly crafted charades, dark secrets coming to light during parlor games, and old friendships returning to haunt the Christmas parties, whom can Jane trust to help her discover the truth and stop the killer from striking again?

A timeless murder mystery with the fascinating, glamorous Mitford sisters at its heart, The Mitford Trial is the fourth installment in the Mitford Murders series from Jessica Fellowes, inspired by a real-life murder in a story full of intrigue, affairs and betrayal....

At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher bearers find an exhausted officer shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is the officer isn't British - he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.

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.

Undeterred by world war and enemy submarines, Amelia Peabody, grandmaster Elizabeth Peters' indomitable archaeologist-sleuth, once again sets sail for Egypt, where ghosts of an ancient past and specters of a present-day evil hover silently over an inscrutable land.

Highlands Lake is a small town…but even there where the most reliable news can be found in the local bakery and friendships last a lifetime…there are those who choose to live outside the rules…Jonathan Delamarck takes his job seriously. As such, murder investigations typically slide to the top of his priority list whether they took place in the last twenty-four hours or sometime in the last two hundred years. He believed that justice began with identifying the individual who was responsible. And that was exactly what he planned to do. Have you ever said something you really wish you ...

On a cold night in February, the popular Lighterman's ball festivities are cut short when a guest of honor, Stephen Bremmer, goes into spasms and abruptly collapses. Once again Inspector Witherspoon returns to the Wrexley Hotel to investigate a murder. The victim was considered a boorish snob who felt entitled to anything and anyone he wanted. Yet despite his Oxford education, he was barely literate, lazy, and prone to make stupid mistakes - his last mistake turned out to be crossing a killer.

December, 1925. A dark, smog-filled London doesn’t seem very Christmassy or exciting, but then Posie Parker, London’s premier female private detective, receives an urgent call from one of her oldest friends: Rufus, Earl of Cardigeon. Summoned to The Mermaid, an ancient hotel in Rye on the Sussex Coast, in the heart of smuggling country, Posie, together with her husband Richard, finds her friend in a real state. As the snow falls and Christmas lights go up, secrets are revealed, and Posie becomes involved in perhaps her most personal case so far.

Lorraine Mansford was nineteen years old, beautiful, popular, sophisticated and murdered. May 1904 Katherine Mansford, the eldest of four sisters, has resigned to a reclusive life. Unlike Lorraine, she could never live up to her father’s expectations. Lorraine was perfect. Yet, a few days before she was murdered, she told Katherine a secret that would destroy their family if anyone found out. Michael Johnston fled the scene of the crime, evaded the law, and he's hiding in an abandoned cabin a beach on Lake Ontario. Katherine’s private refuge. When she discovers him there, she fights ...

Welcome to the Palace movie theater! Now Showing: Philandering husbands, ghostly sidekicks, and a murder or two. When Nora Paige’s movie-star husband leaves her for his latest co-star, she flees Hollywood to take refuge in San Francisco at the Palace, a historic movie theater that shows the classic films she loves. There she finds a band of misfit film buffs who care about movies (almost) as much as she does. She also finds some shady financial dealings and the body of a murdered stranger. Oh, and then there’s Trixie, the lively ghost of a 1930’s usherette who appears only to Nora and...

When Sidney Grice journeys to Yorkshire to solve a mysterious death, March Middleton, his ward, is left to her own devices in a London swarming with danger and vice. Curiosity, as we know, has a dark edge. So when an intriguing letter leads March to the gates of the palatial Saturn Villa and into the nightmarish world of her long-lost uncle, it could be the beginning of an end for all.

Mordecai Tremaine's hobby of choice - crime detection - has left him in need of a holiday. A break away from that gruesome business of murder will be just the ticket, and the picturesque island of Moulin d'Or seems to be just the destination. Amid the sunshine and the sea air, Mordecai falls in with a band of fellow holidaymakers and tries to forget that such a thing as foul play exists. He should have been wiser, of course, because before too long, villainy rears its head, and a dead body is discovered.

Minerva Kenny is a dear woman, but her tendency to "borrow" things without asking has finally caught up with her. William Barrett has learned Minerva's shameful secret, and he's holding it over her head. Mrs. Jeffries and the staff at Upper Edmonton Gardens have hatched a scheme to save her - but when they try to recover the damning evidence from Barrett, they discover something more shocking: Barrett's corpse. Considering the victim's wicked ways, Minerva is far from the only suspect.