Historical Womens Mystery

It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street, fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living with her eccentric mother and her mother's new boyfriend, she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life. So when the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. Even though Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep. Then Lucy goes missing. Now in 2018, Edie is eighty-four and still living in the same small town, when one afternoon she glimpses Lucy Theddle, still looking the same as she did at fifteen.

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.

As the Great War continues to take its toll, headstrong 21-year-old Emily Bryce is determined to contribute to the war effort. She is convinced by a cheeky and handsome Australian pilot that she can do more, and it is not long before she falls in love with him and accepts his proposal of marriage. When he is sent back to the front, Emily volunteers as a “land girl,” tending to the neglected grounds of a large Devonshire estate. It’s here that Emily discovers the long-forgotten journals of a medicine woman who devoted her life to her herbal garden.

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Psychologist and Investigator Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, gravely ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group.

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled 17-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows.

From an electrifying new voice in epic fantasy comes The Raven Scholar, a masterfully woven and playfully inventive tale of imperial intrigue, cutthroat competition, and one scholar’s quest to uncover the truth. Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace...

On a long-delayed errand to remote Wycliffe Manor, ex-Lieutenant Jack de Sackville stumbles across the murdered body of London dandy, Basil Culpepper, in the hedgerow, a long way from his usual haunts. To Jack's dismay, he discovers the earl's daughter Culpepper hiding in Wycliffe's kitchen. Disguised as a lowly cook, Lady Elspeth Villiers may have liked to shoot Culpepper for ruining her life, but she dropped out of sight for more immediate reasons than an old scandal-her wealth has become the focus of greedy men.

From a New York Times bestselling author, a war-weary soldier jumps from a moving freight train to avoid trouble–and lands in more than he bargained for. On the day Thatcher Hutton arrives in Foley, Texas, a local woman goes missing. Thatcher becomes the prime suspect. Standing between him and...

Rescued from a pandemic’s wreckage and raised by the eccentric surgeon Dr. Horace Croft, orphan Nora Beady cares little for Victorian conventions. While other young ladies busy themselves with needlework and watercolors, Nora perfects her sutures and anatomical illustrations. Women face dire consequences if caught practicing medicine, but in Croft’s private clinic, Nora is his most trusted - and secret - assistant. That is, until the new surgical resident, Dr. Daniel Gibson, arrives.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Frozen River, this “genuinely surprising whodunit” (USA Today) reimagines the tantalizing suspense surrounding a scandalous murder mystery that rocked the nation. “This book is more meticulously choreographed than a chorus line. It all pays...

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years, and she assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first place: He was involved—somehow—in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from an impregnable safe in Dublin Castle.

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?

"An atmospheric and evocative whodunnit steeped in suspense, mystery, and illusion." —Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of the sensational bestseller The Lost Apothecary comes a spellbinding tale about two...

It’s early spring of 1947 in idyllic King’s Cove, and the Hughes ladies, mère et filles, are gardening and sorting through the jars of food that have been put up for the winter. But while cleaning up after the roof of their root cellar has caved in slightly, they are horrified to discover a small skeletal hand embedded in the mess. Panicked, they call Lane Winslow, the ex-British secret service agent, and, not without some misgivings about the state of their tense relationship, Lane calls Inspector Darling.

Josie Bianci was killed years ago on a train during a terrorist attack. Gone forever. It’s what her sister, Kit, an ER doctor in Santa Cruz, has always believed. Yet all it takes is a few heart-wrenching seconds to upend Kit’s world. Live coverage of a club fire in Auckland has captured the image of a woman stumbling through the smoke and debris. Her resemblance to Josie is unbelievable. And unmistakable. With it comes a flood of emotions - grief, loss, and anger - that Kit finally has a chance to put to rest: by finding the sister who’s been living a lie.

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.

Molly Murphy is starting to think the cards are stacked against her. She's determined to be a private detective, but hampering her investigations is the fact that she's finding many places in turn-of-the-century New York City where women are not welcome, something that's as frustrating to her fiery Irish pride as it is to her rapidly emptying pocketbook. Then two business opportunities pop up simultaneously. An aristocratic family in Dublin fears their daughter has fled to the New World with her unsavory boyfriend, and they hire Molly to track the two down and send the young woman back home.

1920s London isn’t the ideal place for a brilliant woman with lofty ambitions, but research assistant Saffron Everleigh is determined to beat the odds in a male-dominated field at the University College of London. She embarks on her first research study alongside the insufferably charming Dr. Michael Lee, traveling the countryside with him in response to reports of poisonings. But when Detective Inspector Green is given a case with a set of unusual clues, he asks for her assistance.

Georgie, or Lady Georgiana Rannoch, is busy planning her upcoming nuptials to Darcy O'Mara. Unfortunately, what has started as a simple wedding has become quite a royal headache and grand affair, thanks to a guest list that includes the queen and the appointment of princesses as Georgie's bridesmaids. “If only Darcy and I had eloped!” she thinks, as she attempts to organize her wedding and find a place for her and her husband-to-be to live. Just as she despairs of ever finding a home, her godfather offers his fully staffed country estate. But something sinister is afoot....

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.