Historical Suspense Women Sleuths

When Kat Holloway is blamed when a guest mysteriously takes ill after eating one of her meals, she sets out to prove she had nothing to do with the gentleman’s sickness. She discovers a whole host of people who might wish to do away with the man, and she and her friends begin to hunt for the would-be killer. Simultaneously tasked with crafting the perfect Christmas feast, including the pièce de résistance, the Christmas plum pudding, Kat frantically works to finish all, fearing she’ll have to choose between stopping a murderer and cherishing her precious Christmas moments with her daughter.

Inspector Witherspoon is perplexed. No one seems to know the identity of the dead man dressed like a vicar and propped up against the outside wall of St. Paul's Church. A paper clutched in the corpse's hand reveals the address of a dilapidated and seemingly abandoned cottage - abandoned if you don't count the human skeleton stuffed in the chimney. To link these two bizarre incidents will take all of the resources at Witherspoon's command - and a little help from the efficient Mrs. Jeffries....

Highly sought-after cook Kat Holloway takes a position in a Mayfair mansion and soon finds herself immersed in the odd household of Lord Rankin. Kat is fine with the family's eccentricities as long as they stay away from her kitchen, but trouble finds its way below stairs when her assistant is murdered. Afraid for her life, Kat turns to the mysterious Daniel McAdam for help. Daniel takes a position in the house as a footman and stand-in valet so that he can investigate covertly, but Kat cooks up a suspect list of her own.

In the early days of 1924, Mary Russell and her husband, the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, are given an urgent task by his brother, Mycroft: find a British spy gone missing along India's northwest frontier, where men are dying and trouble is brewing. The spy's name? It is one Holmes knows from his sojourn in India long ago, and one Russell knows from a book. It is Kimball O'Hara, known to the world by the name Rudyard Kipling called him - Kim....

In March of 1926, Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher and her friend and collaborator, Lady Lucy Gerald, head off for several days to a stately home reputed to have the best grotto in the country. Working on a book of architectural follies, they plan to research and photograph it. Leaving her husband and young twins behind, Daisy is expecting a productive weekend at Appsworth Hall, with the only potential difficulty being keeping Lucy from offending the current owner, a manufacturer of plumbing products. Alas, it's not to be quite so simple.

Sarah Malloy has just helped with the delivery of a bouncing baby girl at her women's clinic, when she receives a visit from an engaging and determined young woman writing an article for New Century Magazine. Louisa Rodgers explains that she is researching the dangers of patent remedies. Sarah is only too happy to tell Louisa exactly what she thinks of the so-called medicines. A few days later, Sarah receives a visit from a bereft Bernard Rodgers, who explains that his daughter, Louisa, has been found strangled in the lobby of the building where New Century has its offices.

Kitty Underhay is looking forward to a week of long lunches and wedding planning with her husband-to-be, Captain Matthew Bryant. But the plan is derailed when he is called on to collect a former comrade-in-arms, arriving on the 15:50 from Paddington. As the train bearing Simon Travers pulls up to the platform, a piercing scream rises over the screech of its brakes. Travers is dead in his seat, a dagger in his heart. Only a few individuals had access to Travers’s compartment, and Kitty must find out which of these seemingly benign passengers is, in fact, a cross-country killer.

Normally dead bodies in a graveyard are buried - but not this one. When a woman is found strangled in a North London cemetery with an old newspaper clipping clutched in her hand, Inspector Witherspoon is surprised to find that he and the victim have crossed paths before. Alice Robinson was a respectable widow who ran a quiet Islington lodging house. None of her lodgers have any apparent motive to murder their landlady.

The Christmas trees in Knightsbridge sparkle with festive joy, and there’s nothing more fun than Christmas cocktail parties to ring in the new year of 1922. Camille Divine, known as Lady Camille Divine, has decorated her little house in Birdcage Mews with glistening decorations and a beautiful Christmas tree, but she has more on her mind than the festive season.

In this Gaslight Mystery from the national best-selling author of Murder in Murray Hill, midwife Sarah Brandt and Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy investigate foul play in the secretive high-society world of 19th-century New York City....

Amid the grim realities of wartime Britain, inside during the blackout hidden from the tatters left by the Blitz, glitz and glamour live onstage in the West End. But at one theater, The Regent, a malevolent force is causing escalating problems. Sabotage, damage and injury feed mistrust among the cast and crew.

On a lovely June night in 1924, amateur detective Annalee Spain is mingling bravely at a high-class political fundraiser in the lush backyard garden of famed political fixer Cooper Coates, one of the wealthiest men in Denver’s Black neighborhood of Five Points. When Coates’s young daughter discovers a pretty stranger dead in her father’s garden shed, Annalee is thrust onto the baffling new case just as she’s reeling from another recent discovery—a handwritten letter, found buried in her own garden, that reveals the identity of her mother.

1915, London: Working in the dusty bookshop that her Aunt Violet mysteriously inherited, Hannah Merrill is accustomed to finding twists in every tale. But discovering her beloved best friend Lily-Anne – with a paperknife through her heart – in the middle of the bookshop, is not a plotline she saw coming. The case is anything but textbook. With the discovery of a coded German message, and Hannah’s instinct that Lily-Anne’s husband is keeping secrets, she determines to get to the bottom of it. She can’t do it alone though.

The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don't let that fool you. She's a household name, wrangling wayward husbands, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley. When shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on a city beach, Miss Cocks and Ethel are ordered to stay out of the investigation and leave it to the men. But when Dora's workmate goes missing soon after, the women suspect something sinister.

Someone is killing the nuns of Ireland. The grisly discovery of an elderly sister of Saint Brigid's monastery strangled, bled dry, and thrown into a bog is just the beginning. Soon a beautiful young nun is found decapitated and hung from a barren tree. It doesn't take long before the members of the struggling monastic community of Kildare realize that not only are the nuns being hunted by a serial killer, but the murderer is performing the gruesome slayings in the manner of the ancient druid sacrifices.

New York City, 1919. Lillie Mead mourns the love she lost in the war. But when a wealthy British friend offers her a reporting job across the pond, she hopes accepting will help her rebuild her life. She barely has time to unpack before she’s assigned the scoop of a poisoned socialite’s death. As the clues take a turn for the scandalous, Lillie unearths shocking skeletons in the victim’s closet. But she never expected the threads of the beloved woman’s life to weave with hers. Can Lillie expose the truth before her own death makes the front page?

Lord Francis and Lady Ottilia Fanshawe have suffered a devastating blow. With Ottilia sunk deep into a depression, Francis is desperate to get his beloved wife back. So when he hears about a murder at the seaside town of Weymouth, an idea starts to form.... A young girl's body has been discovered, laid out in an open coffin, surrounded by candles. The staged scene, and the fact that the victim was a member of a theatrical troupe, suggests one of her colleagues is the killer. Knowing Ottilia's sharp intuition and penchant for solving mysteries, Francis brings her to the murder site.

When a Quaker Kindertransport chaperone is murdered in the East End of London, Britain’s counterintelligence spymaster tasks Olivia Denis to join the group rescuing children from Nazi Germany. Olivia must find not only a killer, but a traitor relaying sensitive material to the enemy. Once they reach Berlin, Olivia discovers she must rescue the family of an imprisoned British spy before she leaves the next day.

She keeps house for Inspector Witherspoon...and keeps him on his toes. Everyone's awed by his Scotland Yard successes - but they don't know about his secret weapon. No matter how messy the murder or how dirty the deed, Mrs. Jeffries's polished detection skills are up to the task...proving that behind every great man there's a woman - and that a crimesolver's work is never done. When the general office manager of Sutcliffe Manufacturing is murdered, no one is really surprised. Ronald Dearman was anything but a dear man. The tyrannical bully had more than enough enemies to go around.

July 1816. Kendra Donovan could use a distraction. The FBI agent has been dealing with a serious case of cold feet after impulsively agreeing to marry Alec, the Marquis of Sutcliffe. And if that isn't enough, there is also the tantalizing possibility that maybe, just maybe she could return to her own timeline. When Reginald Lansing, the Earl of Craymore, is found mortally wounded on the Duke of Aldridge's land, Kendra gets the distraction that she's been looking for.