Historical House Mysteries

On the world's first commodities exchange, fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted trader in the city's close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows this only too well. Once among the city's most envied merchants, Miguel has lost everything in a sudden shift in the sugar markets. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living on the charity of his petty younger brother, Miguel must find a way to restore his wealth and reputation.

Annie Bishop is 16 years old when she first climbs the steps of Haverford House ready to take service as a maid. She knows her place until, during a summer of high society, she crosses paths with wealthy American heir, Thomas Everard. In his arms, Annie dares to dream of a different life. Until she vanishes without a trace.

Tanzania, 1964. When Katie Barstow, A-list actress, and her new husband, David Hill, decide to bring their Hollywood friends to the Serengeti for their honeymoon, they envision giraffes gently eating leaves from the tall acacia trees, great swarms of wildebeests crossing the Mara River, and herds of zebras storming the sandy plains. Their glamorous guests—including Katie’s best friend, Carmen Tedesco, and Terrance Dutton, the celebrated Black actor who stars alongside Katie in the highly controversial film Tender Madness—will spend their days taking photos.

Enter the lush world of 1950s New York City, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors live side by side in the glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in this debut novel from the New York Times best-selling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue. When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: Plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong.

Maggie Hope has come a long way since serving as a typist for Winston Churchill. Now she's working undercover for the Special Operations Executive in the elegant but eerily silent city of Paris, where SS officers prowl the streets in their Mercedes and the Ritz is draped with swastika banners. Walking among the enemy is tense and terrifying, and even though she's disguised in chic Chanel, Maggie can't help longing for home.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant's house nearby. As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing.

Life is good for Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler. She loves her job, loves her kids, and remains civil to her ex-husband, Paul. But everything changes when her father, a man who survived the horrors of World War II, dies under strange circumstances and leaves behind clues to a secret he kept his entire life...a secret about something called the Amber Room.

World War II has finally come home to Britain, but it takes more than nightly air raids to rattle intrepid spy and expert code breaker Maggie Hope. After serving as a secret agent to protect Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, Maggie is now an elite member of the Special Operations Executive–a black ops organization designed to aid the British effort abroad–and her first assignment sends her straight into Nazi-controlled Berlin, the very heart of the German war machine. Relying on her quick wit and keen instincts, Maggie infiltrates the highest level of Berlin society, gathering information to pass on to London headquarters. But the secrets she unveils will expose a darker, more dangerous side of the war–and of her own past.

World War II rages on across Europe, but Maggie Hope has finally found a moment of rest on the pastoral coast of western Scotland. Home from an undercover mission in Berlin, she settles down to teach at her old spy training camp, and to heal from scars on both her body and heart. Yet instead of enjoying the quieter pace of life, Maggie is quickly drawn into another web of danger and intrigue.

1940: In south-west Ireland, the young and beautiful Lady Charlotte Rathmore is pronounced dead after she disappears by the lake of Blackwater Hall. In London, on the brink of the Blitz, Nancy Rathmore is grieving Charlotte's death when a letter arrives containing a secret that she is sworn to keep. 2019: Ellie Fitzgerald is forced to leave Dublin disgraced and heartbroken. Abandoning journalism, she returns to rural Kerry to weather out the storm. But, when she discovers a faded letter, tucked inside the pages of an old book, she finds herself drawn in by a long-buried secret.

The tomb of China’s First Emperor, guarded by an underground army of terra-cotta warriors, has remained sealed for more than 2,000 years. Though it’s regarded as one of the greatest archaeological sites in the world, the Chinese government won’t allow anyone to open it.

It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young Black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

It's 1942 and Willowjean "Will" Parker is a scrappy circus runaway whose knife-throwing skills have just saved the life of New York's best, and most unorthodox, private investigator, Lillian Pentecost. When the dapper detective summons Will a few days later, she doesn't expect to be offered a life-changing proposition: Lillian's multiple sclerosis means she can't keep up with her old case load alone, so she wants to hire Will to be her right-hand woman. In return, Will is to receive a salary, room and board, and training in Lillian's very particular art of investigation.

1939. Ansel Luxford has everything a person could want—a comfortable career, a brilliant spouse, a beautiful new baby. But he is obsessed by a belief that Europe is on the precipice of a war that will grow to consume the world. The United States is officially proclaiming neutrality in any foreign conflict, but when Ansel is offered an opportunity to move to Washington, D.C., to join a clandestine project within the Treasury Department that is working to undermine Nazi Germany, he uproots his family overnight and takes on the challenge of a lifetime.

Sixth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Checkmate takes place in 1557, where Francis Crawford of Lymond is once again in France, leading an army against England. But even as the Scots adventurer succeeds brilliantly on the battlefield, his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces on both sides.

In the quaint village of Birdswing, the winter of 1939 is bitterly cold. Still haunted by his ex-wife’s murder and eager to contact the Fenton House ghost, Ben enlists Lady Juliet in an amateur séance. But the surprise return of Juliet’s rogue husband, Ethan, upends her life, setting tongues wagging. While she fights to make him sign divorce papers, a bloodless, naked corpse confronts Ben. The murdered man, handsome but uneducated and known to make passes at all things female, is discovered in an oh-so-proper estate.

Junio de 1960. Un temporal mantiene aisladas en la idílica isla de Utakos, frente a Corfú, a nueve personas alojadas en el pequeño hotel local. Nada hace presagiar lo que está a punto de ocurrir: Edith Mander, una discreta turista inglesa, aparece muerta en el pabellón de la playa. Lo que parece un suicidio revela indicios imperceptibles para cualquiera salvo para Hopalong Basil, un actor en decadencia que en otro tiempo encarnó en la pantalla al más célebre detective de todos los tiempos.

As Christmas of 1804 approaches, Jane Austen finds herself "[I]nsupportably bored with Bath, and the littleness of a town". It is with relief that she accepts a peculiar commission from her Gentleman Rogue, Lord Harold Trowbridge - to shadow his niece, Lady Desdemona, who has fled to Bath to avoid the attentions of the unsavory earl of Swithin. But Jane's idle diversion turns deadly when a man is discovered stabbed to death in the Theatre Royal. Adding to the mystery is an unusual object found on the victim's body - a pendant that contains a portrait of an eye!