Historical Detective

Everyone at the party had a secret. Someone killed to keep theirs. London, 1922. Draper’s daughter Marjorie Swallow is 24, independent, and determined to live life to the full. A secretarial post with enigmatic American detective Mrs Jameson looks just the ticket. And soon she’s in the thick of it. When the bohemian party they attend ends in murder, there is no shortage of suspects. Half of Bloomsbury wanted Mrs Norris dead – but who wielded the knife? Was it the handsome but troubled artist? The vivacious young actress? Or even the aristocratic lady novelist?

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.

In this superbly accomplished new Charlotte and Thomas Pitt adventure, Anne Perry takes us beneath the glittering surface of wealthy Victorian society into a nightmare world of fear and intimidation, where women are too often blamed for the violent attacks against them, and powerful men take what they want, leaving others to pay the price. The horrifying rape and apparent suicide of Catherine Quixwood, wife of a wealthy merchant banker, falls outside the new jurisdiction of Special Branch head Thomas Pitt, but so pervasively offensive are the rumors about the victim that Pitt quietly takes a hand in the investigation.

September, 1923. Despite closing her first case, high society lady detective Olive Belgrave hasn’t found a new client. She’s taken a job as a hat model to pay for her poky boarding house room. But then a job offer comes her way—make discreet inquiries about a famous author who’s disappeared. Olive travels to the English countryside to hunt for the missing mystery author. But soon after she arrives in the sleepy village, a body is discovered. Then a second murder focuses the police’s attention on Olive, and she must clear her name before the murderer pens a plot that frames her.

When eighteen-year-old aspiring scientist Elinor Dashwood discovers her beloved father slumped over the desk of his office study, she knows his death means dire straits for the Dashwood women. To make matters worse, an outdated will entails his estate—including Norland & Company, the private investigation firm where her younger sister Marianne worked as her father’s partner and protégé—to their half-brother and his haughty wife, who waste no time in forcing the Dashwoods out of their home and into a cramped apartment on London’s Barton Street.

April, 1867. A train departs King's Cross station bound for Lincoln. Among the passengers is a man attired in the garb of one in high ecclesiastical office.

Murder's a beach! A family holiday turns deadly at Brighton Beach. When Ginger and Basil and their family check into the Brighton Beach Boutique Hotel on a lovely warm day in June of 1926, a shocking discovery upsets their plans to relax in the sun and surf. There’s a murderer amongst the holidayers: Is it the starlet? The earl? The disgruntled businessman? In this Agatha Christie-style addition to the Ginger Gold Mystery series, not only will Ginger not finish her book, she and Basil might not get out of the hotel alive.

Wighard, archbishop designate of Canterbury, has been discovered garrotted in his chambers in the Lateran Palace in Rome in the autumn of AD 664. The solution to this terrible crime appears simple as the palace guards have arrested Brother Ronan Ragallach, as he fled from Wighard's chamber. Although the Irish monk denies responsibility, Bishop Gelasius is convinced the crime is political and that Wighard was slain in pique at the triumph of the pro-Roman Anglo-Saxon clergy in their debate with the pro-Columba Irish clergy at Whitby.

1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914. Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse.

In the streets of 1936 Oxford, dark forces are at play and members of a secret society keep turning up dead. After being called upon to help solve these murders, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and their fellow literary enthusiasts known around town as the Inklings trade their pens for magnifying glasses to catch this evasive killer. With time running out, they get a helping hand from mystery writers Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to help unravel a sinister web of secrets. Can they crack the case before the murderer strikes again?

Published in January 1922, The Secret Adversary is the second detective fiction novel by British crime novelist Agatha Christie. The book introduces the characters of Tommy Beresford and Prudence Tuppence Cowley, two out-of-work 20-somethings in post-war London. The two agree to form The Young Adventurers, Ltd, hiring themselves out with the slogan no reasonable offer refused. They are quickly enlisted to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young woman who was entrusted with sensitive diplomatic documents amid the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

It is 1939 and the Second World War looms ever closer. Blind war veteran Frederick Rowlands travels to the neutral territory of Ireland at the behest of Celia Swift, whose husband, Edward Swift, Lord Castleford, has been receiving mysterious death threats. When a body is discovered, Castleford finds himself being accused of a murder he did not commit. As Castleford’s trial begins, Rowlands must fight to save his friend’s reputation — and his neck from the gallows. But will the Blind Detective identify the true killer in time, or will it be too late?

May 1915. As zeppelin bombs fall on London and with the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German hysteria reaches fever pitch and attacks on German immigrants surge. Not even the West End of London is immune. Jacob Stein's bespoke tailoring business comes under brutal attack, leaving his safe ransacked, his daughter, Ruth, raped and Jacob dead.

After she captured the interest of detective Sir Charles Sheridan during their first case together, Kathryn Ardleigh and Sir Charles are brought together once more by the demise of a local constable and the disappearance of a child. The sleuthing couple catches a trail of deadly greed and criminal mischief once again and, with the help of a shy woman who calls herself Beatrix Potter, Kate intends to uncover the sinister secrets of Gallows Green.

Among the workhouses and pudding shops of South London, Private Detective William Arrowood is presented with far grittier, more violent, and considerably less well-paid cases than Sherlock Holmes. Arrowood has no doubt who is the better detective, and when Mr. and Mrs. Barclay engage him to find their estranged daughter, Birdie, he’s sure it won’t be long before he and his assistant, Barnett, have tracked her down.

The Christmas season brings strange guests to the medieval nunnery of St. Frideswide's. They bear with them the badly mangled body of a villager, swearing they found the drunken fool lying in a ditch. But Meg, the victim's wife and a scullery maid of the cloister, thinks there are far fouler deeds afoot. As the players rehearse for the nativity, ancient scandals lick at their heels and dark desperation haunts Meg's steps as she finds cruel feudal laws threatening to strip away the lands that would support both her and her sons in the wake of her husband's death.

The best of the golden age crime writers, praised by all the top modern writers in the field including P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers created the immortal Lord Peter Wimsey. His second appearance is a thrilling quest to save his own brother - the Duke of Denver - from the hangman. The Duke of Denver, accused of murder, stands trial for his life in the House of Lords. Naturally, his brother Lord Peter Wimsey is investigating the crime - this is a family affair.

Eva has never felt like she belonged...not in her own family or with her friends in New York City, and certainly not at a fancy boarding school like Hardwick Preparatory Academy. So, when she is invited to join the Fives, an elite secret society, she jumps at the opportunity to finally be a part of something.

In his forties, the Reverend Charles Howard still cut an impressive figure. A married Presbyterian minister in Toronto’s east end, Howard was popular with the congregation that elected him, especially with the ladies, and most particularly with Miss Sarah Dignam. Respected in the community, Howard, as Visitor for the House of Industry, sat in judgment on the poor, assessing their applications for the workhouse. But now Howard is dead, stabbed and brutally beaten by someone he invited into his office.

Emperor Domitian is hosting a banquet for the senators in honour of fallen soldiers, and it's an invitation Aelianus and Justinus Camillus dare not refuse. On arrival, they enter a black-painted room furnished with couches resembling those found in mausoleums, complete with a tombstone bearing each of the senators' names. As the evening progresses the brothers conclude that Domitian has finally turned against them for their uncle's part in a plot to oust his father and start to wonder if they'll ever see the light of day again....