Cozy Historical Fiction

Lady Eleanor Swift is at Buckingham Palace to see her new husband, Detective Chief Inspector Seldon, knighted. Brimming with pride, all she can hope is that Gladstone the bulldog behaves himself in front of the king. But the happy day is overshadowed when Dilly Dalrymple, a royal guard, collapses. The head of the royal police asks Eleanor and Hugh to investigate the murder–unofficially. This is her first clue that there’s more to the story....

England, 1920. Eleanor Swift has spent the last few years travelling the world: taking tea in China, tasting alligators in Peru, escaping bandits in Persia and she has just arrived in England after a chaotic 45-day flight from South Africa. Chipstone is about the sleepiest town you could have the misfortune to meet. But then, from the edge of a quarry, through the driving rain, Eleanor is shocked to see a man shot and killed in the distance. Before she can climb down to the spot, the villain is gone and the body has vanished.

When Adeline Bertrand-Verdon, the haughty, conniving president of the Proust Association, is murdered, Inspector Jean-Pierre Foucheroux is called on to lead the investigation. Soon Inspector Foucheroux is overwhelmed by a seemingly endless list of suspects: from her assistant to her colleagues, her fiancé to her lover, almost everyone Adeline knew had motive to kill her.

Isabella Waverly only means to comfort the woman felled on a London street. In her final dying moments, she thrusts a letter into Bella’s hand. It’s an offer of employment in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace, and everything the budding young chef desperately wants: an escape from the constrictions of her life as a lowly servant. In the stranger’s stead, Bella can spread her wings. Arriving as Helen Barton from Yorkshire, she pursues her passion for creating culinary delights, served to the delighted Queen Victoria herself.

It is the summer of 1919, and Constance Haverhill is without prospects. Now that all the men have returned from the front, she has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war. While she looks for a position as a bookkeeper or—horror—a governess, she’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Despite having only weeks to find a permanent home, Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea after she rescues the local baronet’s daughter, Poppy Wirrall, from a social faux pas.

Molly Murphy always knew she'd end up in trouble, just as her mother predicted. So, when she commits murder in self-defense, she flees her cherished Ireland, under cover of a false identity, for the anonymous shores of late 19th-century America. When she arrives in New York and sees the welcoming promise of freedom in the Statue of Liberty, Molly begins to breathe easier. But when a man is murdered on Ellis Island, a man Molly was seen arguing with, she becomes a prime suspect in the crime.

London, 1941: Miss Jane Treen is at her desk, strong black coffee in hand and fluffy ginger cat by her side, when her top-secret government work is interrupted by an urgent call to Devon. A woman has been found dead in a lake in a place where she shouldn’t have been. Jane needs to gather the clues and find the killer before someone else from the agency gets hurt… Shy and handsome code-breaker Arthur Cilento is bewildered by the arrival of the efficient Miss Treen and her cat Marmaduke.

Dr. Garrett Gibson, the only female physician in England, is as daring and independent as any man - why not take her pleasures like one? Yet she has never been tempted to embark on an affair - until now. Ethan Ransom, a former detective for Scotland Yard, is as gallant as he is secretive, a rumored assassin whose true loyalties are a mystery. For one exhilarating night, they give in to their potent attraction before becoming strangers again. But she is soon drawn into his most dangerous assignment yet.

THE WRONG MAN When young Ben Carter is found murdered in an alleyway one snowy night in Mydworth, all the evidence points to his best pal. Harry and Kat become involved - can they find the real culprit? SECRETS ON THE COTE D'AZUR When Harry and Kat head south to the French Riviera, they look forward to dazzling parties, a shimmering sea, and wonderful food... A DISTANT VOICE It's Midsummer in Mydworth - and a celebrated medium is in town with his lucrative supernatural show, raising suspicions.

From the authors of the best-selling series CHERRINGHAM. This compilation contains episodes 10-12:. CITY HEAT. Kat brings Harry across the Atlantic to New York for a planned whirlwind time in her hometown. But when wealthy Teddy Crowther is kidnapped by the mob, the pair are called in to help. Soon they find themselves playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse. FOOL'S GOLD. When young Ewan Mackay sails his small dinghy out to a mysterious wreck site a few miles off the coast of Littlehampton, he never returns.

Nothing is simple when you're 35th in line for the British crown, least of all marriage. But with love on their side and plans to elope, Lady Georgiana Rannoch and her beau, Darcy O'Mara, hope to bypass a few royal rules....

Penny dreadful writer Kate Ardleigh solves one mystery after another in this bundle collection of the first three titles in Robin Paige's Victorian Mystery series.

Spring, 1909, and Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and all-round eccentric, is enjoying a well-deserved rest. But a week after a trip to the cattle market, Spencer Caradine, a local farmer, turns up dead in the pub, face-down in his beef and mushroom pie. Once again, it is up to Lady Hardcastle and her maid, Florence, to solve the case. Armed with wit and whimsy, not to mention Florence’s mean right hook, the pair set out to discover what really happened and why. Was it poison or just ill luck?

Award-winning author Alan Bradley returns with another beguiling novel starring the insidiously clever and unflappable 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The precocious chemist with a passion for poisons uncovers a fresh slew of misdeeds in the hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey - mysteries involving a missing tot, a fortune-teller, and a corpse in Flavia’s own backyard. Flavia had asked the old Gypsy woman to tell her fortune, but never expected to stumble across the poor soul, bludgeoned in the wee hours in her own caravan.

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...

Autumn, 1921. Lady Eleanor Swift is invited to her old school, St Mary’s, as a guest speaker. Her favorite teacher, Mrs. Wadsworth, has asked that Eleanor talk about her intrepid travels around the globe - travelling the Silk Road by bicycle, crossing the Himalayas and even befriending the Maharaja of India. But in the circumstances, perhaps it would have been a good idea to talk about her career as a daring detective. Because no sooner has Eleanor brushed up on her times tables than she is greeted by terrible news: Mrs. Wadsworth has been murdered.

As England swelters during the hottest summer on record, Posie Parker, Private Detective, is summoned to Worton Hall Film Studios, where she steps into the heart of a sinister new mystery. Silvia Hanro, the blonde movie star du jour, has received death threats and a severed human finger alongside her morning coffee, and it’s all got too, too much.

Summer, 1921. Lady Eleanor Swift, the best amateur sleuth in the country, is delighted to be in charge of the prize-giving at her village summer fair. But the traditional homemade raft race takes a tragic turn when the local undertaker, Solemn Jon, turns up dead amongst the ducks. Jon was the life of any party and loved by the entire village. Surely this was simply an awful accident? But when a spiteful obituary is printed in the local paper, Eleanor realizes there may be more to Jon’s death than first thought.

It's late 1936, and King Edward is in turmoil, having fallen in love with the scandalously divorced and even more scandalously American Wallis Simpson. He wants to marry her but knows that doing so will jeopardize his crown. Edward confides in his dear friend Darcy, Georgie's husband, and the couple agree to hide Wallis in their home while Edward figures out what to do. But unbeknownst to Georgie and Darcy, Sir Hubert, the owner of the estate, has given a film crew permission to shoot a motion picture about Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn on the grounds

From the authors of the best-selling series "CHERRINGHAM". This compilation contains episodes 4-6: "MURDER WORE A MASK": Lavinia's annual Masked Ball at Mydworth Manor is a highlight of the season - but the lavish party comes to a full stop when one of the guests is found dead down by the lake. Harry and Kat suspect that the dead man was the victim of a clever case of murder. And the killer's work is not yet done... "DEADLY CARGO": Mydworth's Excelsior Radio Company is world-famous for its expensive radio-phonographs.