Historical Women Detectives

With London's streets deserted, a young flower girl is murdered. But why was she out so late on the foggiest night of the year? Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard has nowhere to even begin looking for a suspect. However, Mrs. Jeffries, his housekeeper, is even more accomplished at detection than she is at household management. A policeman's widow herself, her quick wits allow her to nudge the inspector in the right direction to solve the mystery.

The ladies of the Mayfair Orchid and Exotic Plant Society are known for a bit of friendly rivalry, but the backstabbing has never been literal - until now. When Hiram Filmore, an orchid hunter and supplier, is found dead in Mrs. Helena Rayburn's conservatory, Inspector Witherspoon is called in to weed out a murderer. When it comes out that Mrs. Rayburn and her flowery friends knew each other from long ago, Mrs. Jeffries begins to suspect that there's more to unearth about this case than meets the eye.

Jane Austen, novelist and private investigator, is back on another case, this one involving the Royal Navy. Her brother Frank's friend, Tom Seagrave, is in the brig, accused by his first mate of stabbing a French captain after the captain surrendered. Tom denies the charges, but his dagger was found in the French captain's chest. To clear up this mystery, Jane agrees to go to the Wool House, a building where French prisoners are jailed.

Jane Austen is enjoying August, 1806, among Derbyshire's craggy peaks, sparkling streams, and cavernous gorges. That is, until she discovers the corpse of a young gentleman whose blond curls and delicate features suggest the face of an angel.

As Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes embark on their 11th adventure together, they find themselves immersed in the world of silent filmmaking. Here, the pirates are real—and unlike the shooting done with a camera, this sort can be deadly.

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.

November, 1923. Olive’s school chum, Gigi, invites Olive to London because Gigi’s dotty grandmother fears for her life—or so she’s said to Gigi. However Olive is surprised to find that the dowager is far from muddled. The sharp and imperious matriarch refuses to admit to her worries and sends Olive on her way. Without a client or case, Olive is swept into the glittering lifestyle of the “fast set,” and their decadent excess. But then among the cocktails and champagne, a murderer strikes during a frivolous party game, and Olive realizes the dowager’s fears were well-founded.

When Bradon Riggston decides to write his family history, he is shocked to find that many of his relatives and their friends have died by unfortunate accidents. Are Riggston family members and their close associates just unlucky, or is there some sinister power working behind the scenes? Holmes and Watson are called in to investigate, only to uncover a deadly saga of revenge for long-hidden crimes.

England, 1917. Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick - but she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion. Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella - sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs - and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.

Flavia Albia is a private investigator, always drawn to an intriguing puzzle - even if it is put to her by her new husband's hostile ex-wife. On the Quirinal Hill, Clodia Volumnia, a very young girl with stars in her eyes, has died, amid suggestions that she was poisoned by a love potion. It will have been supplied by a local witch, who goes by the name of Pandora, though Albia learns that Pandora carries on a trade in herbal beauty products while hiding much more dangerous connections.

The next book in the gripping Flavia Albia series, by acclaimed author Lindsey Davis. A tragic accident...or was it? Emperor Domitian has been awarded (or rather, has demanded) yet another Triumph to celebrate two so-called victories. Preparations are going smoothly until one of the men overseeing arrangements for the celebration accidentally falls to his death from a cliff on the symbolic Capitoline Hill. But an old woman comes forward, insisting that the man was in fact pushed - and she refuses to leave it alone.

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.

A modern woman in 1907, Lady Dunbridge is not about to let a little thing like the death of her husband ruin her social life. She's ready to take the dazzling world of Gilded Age Manhattan by storm. From the decadence of high society balls to the underbelly of Belmont horse racing, romance, murder, and scandals abound. Someone simply must do something. And Lady Dunbridge is happy to oblige.

Posie Parker always dreamt of becoming a Private Detective. So with nothing to lose, and the tiniest scrap of an inheritance and her haughty cat, Mr Minks, in tow, she sets up her own Detective Agency in Bloomsbury. But clients are hard to come by, and all seems in vain, until Posie receives an urgent call from her childhood friend, Lord Rufus Cardigeon, who is up to his neck in bother. He’s been robbed of a family heirloom—the priceless Maharajah diamond—by his showgirl fiancée, Lucky Lucy Gibson.

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.

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.

November, 1923. An invitation to a house party at the estate of Parkview Hall is a welcome respite for Olive Belgrave, a newly minted working girl who’s become the solver of high society’s trickiest problems. But when the sumptuous black-tie event turns deadly, Olive’s cousin Peter becomes the main suspect. Olive must unmask a sophisticated killer before an innocent man takes the blame . . . because murder doesn’t RSVP.

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.

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.

Twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is back at Buckshaw at last, but her homecoming is overshadowed by news of her father's illness. Forbidden from visiting him in hospital, Flavia busies herself in the village, but she soon makes a macabre discovery: the corpse of a reclusive woodcarver in an empty house, except for a curiously uncurious cat. Curiosity may not kill this cat, but Flavia is energized at the prospect of a new investigation. However, what awaits Flavia will shake her to the core.