Regency Thriller

Besieged by gambling debts, a desperate gentleman purchases a diary as a tool for blackmail. But he does not live to carry out his plans. He is murdered, and the diary is stolen. Now Tobias March, discrete private investigator, has been hired to find the incriminating diary. Tobias is familiar with danger, but when his inquiries lead him to the beautiful entrepreneur Lavinia Lake, his emotions are sidetracked.

Finally, Flora Hyde-Clare has wrest the narrative from Beatrice by finding her own compelling murder mystery to solve. Well, it’s not entirely her own because the victim is her cousin’s former beau Mr. Theodore Davies, whose father cruelly separated the young lovers (though not so cruelly, for it left the door open for Bea to woo the duke of Kesgrave).

It is hardly surprising Verity Lark can’t sleep at night with all the thoughts darting through her mind: her recent stay in Newgate, her debt to Colson Hardwicke, the horrible abuse suffered by the children at Fortescue’s that her reporting on the orphan asylum several years earlier had failed to uncover. And then of course there are the shooting lessons she has promised to give to the Duchess of Kesgrave. Verity has spent three months cruelly mocking the former spinster for her investigative pretensions, and now she is obligated to teach the woman how to fire a deadly weapon.

Captain Gabriel Lacey travels with Lady Breckenridge to his boyhood home in northern Norfolk only to discover mysterious happenings in and around the Lacey estate. A young woman, cousin of an old friend, has gone missing, strange objects appear in Lacey's ruined house, and the dark windmills on the marshes keep pulling Lacey to them.

Justine DeCabrillac, daughter of the nobility whose parents died in the chaos of the Revolution, is rescued from a decadent child brothel by a woman of the French Secret Police. Justine, too, becomes a great spy for France. Attacked on a rainy London street, Justine knows only one man can save her: Hawker, her oldest friend - her oldest enemy. London is crawling with hidden assassins, and someone is out to frame Hawker for murder. The two spies must work together to find who's out to destroy them.

With the epic victory at Waterloo behind them, Arianna and Saybrook are looking forward to a quiet summer of scholarship, far from the turmoil of war and politics. But little do they know that an even more dangerous battle is about to test their mettle. The shocking news that Lord Grentham, the steely minister of state security, has been accused of treason and is on the run from arrest takes them and their close circle of friends by surprise. Arianna and Saybrook don't want to believe it. Despite their fraught past with the minister, they've developed a grudging friendship.

Lady Arianna Hadley and her husband, the Earl of Saybrook, want nothing more than to savor a quiet life embellished by the occasional cup of the finest chocolate. However, when they receive orders to travel to Scotland and capture an elusive traitor, they feel their duty to the Crown must come first. In a laboratory in Scotland, they discover the corpse of a chemistry professor - and cryptic papers hinting at a dangerous new discovery now in enemy hands. Racing against time, Arianna and Saybrook pursue their most cunning and dangerous adversary

Since the new Duchess of Kesgrave cannot be swayed from her unfortunate interest in dead bodies, Lady Abercrombie decides to confront the matter head-on by hosting a murder mystery dinner party. Gathering together several of society’s most influential members, she concocts an amusing puzzle-play, assigns roles, and stands back to allow Bea to impress them all with her ingenuity.

The Sherbrooke family saga continues with James and Jason Sherbrooke, identical male twins who look exactly like their beautiful Aunt Melissande, and not at all like their father, the earl, which riles him no end.

Captain Gabriel Lacey begins Spring 1818 preparing for a duel. But while he focuses on the affair of honor, darkness, greed, and death stalk the streets of London and bring tragedy to a family Lacey has grown close to. With the aid of Lucius Grenville, London's most famous dandy, and Brewster, a ruffian employed by an underworld criminal, Lacey's investigation takes him to the squalid lanes of Seven Dials, to houses that practice a highly illegal trade, spelling ruin and possible hanging for those caught within.

Late December, 1818: As Captain Gabriel Lacey prepares for his upcoming wedding, his former neighbor, Marianne Simmons, comes to him about an actress friend who's gone missing. Lacey agrees to help look for the actress, little realizing that the search will pit him against men who think nothing of abduction, assault, or sending incendiary devices to the innocent.

England, 1817. Captain Lacey takes a post as a secretary at the Sudbury School in Berkshire, a school for sons of the wealthiest merchants and bankers in England. As soon as he arrives, Lacey discovers that he's been hired for more than his letter-writing skills. A series of disturbing pranks have kept the school in an uproar, and the headmaster expects Lacey to discover the identity of the prankster. The problems intensify when a groom from the school's stables turns up dead in a lock of the nearby canal.

Ten years ago, Thomas Paxton was sent by Revolutionary France to infiltrate the British Intelligence Service. Now his sense of honor brings him back to London to confess. But instead of facing the gallows, he is given one last impossible assignment to prove his loyalty. Lovely, lying former French spy Camille Leyland is dragged from obscurity by threats and blackmail.

James Denis gives Captain Lacey a task to deliver a mysterious package to a man with an office near the Custom House on the bank of the Thames. Lacey, who has been drawn into danger delivering items for Denis before, opens the package to find a single chess piece - a white queen. The piece tells Lacey nothing, but he soon realizes it plays deeply into Denis’s ongoing battle for control of London’s underworld.

London, 1819. When Brewster, my bodyguard, comes to me about a murder of a pugilist - and what’s more, says his wife has summoned me - I must hasten to St. Giles to find a killer before Brewster is arrested for the crime. This is made difficult because Donata's late husband’s odious cousin has materialized to try to wrest her son into his care. After all, seven-year-old Peter is a viscount, and his cousin wants to get closer to the title.

London, 1813. In the gilded corridors of St. James's Palace, Lord Percy and Lady Grace face a mystery that could shake the throne itself. A murder and audacious theft of the Prince Regent's new ruby dagger thrusts them back into a web of deception and treachery. Tarnished by his past behavior, Lord Percy is focused on regaining favor with the ton. When the queen demands he deliver the murderer and the stolen gift, he cannot refuse.

When I agree to visit Grenville in his villa near Rome, I scarcely imagine that I immediately will become embroiled in mystery and mayhem. James Denis has requested that I purchase an antique from a collector, one Conte de Luca. Before I can approach this count, I am recruited by a Roman a man to help rescue his daughter from a cool aristocrat, and then asked to solve the murder of an Englishman—by a man who is already dead.

When Captain Gabriel Lacey finds himself standing over a dead body in Brighton Pavilion, bloody sword in hand and no memory of how he got there, he immediately fears he is a murderer. The dead man is Colonel Hamilton Isherwood, a man Lacey clashed with after the battle of Salamanca in Spain seven years before. As Lacey tries to piece together the events of the previous night, he discovers he’d promised to help a Quaker gentleman find his missing son, and that the Society of Friends might know far more about his strange night out than anyone else.

Hollis Sands has never gotten over her husband's death. Ricky had been a famous popular singer, and she wrote her best songs for him. Hollis can't believe he took his own life. Perhaps it was something else...murder. Finally, at Windtop in Cold Spring Harbor, Hollis finds sanctuary, and begins to put in place the pieces of her life. But strange and frightening things keep happening. Voices sing the song "Rainsong" that she wrote for Ricky. Guitars play from nowhere.

England, 1819. Two enigmatic Americans arrive in London and soon after, a bank collapses. A man is found dead on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stews of Seven Dials. A deathbed vigil ends in an act of theft and a beautiful heiress flirts with her inferiors. A strange destiny links each of these events to the American boy Edgar Allen Poe, brought to England by his foster father and sent to the leafy village of Stoke Newington to be educated.