Victorian Suspense

Lord Charles Sheridan and his American wife, Kate, have heard some truly awful things about Britain’s most notorious prison. But Dartmoor and its mist-shrouded environs hold special appeal for both Sheridans. Kate hopes to find inspiration for her new Gothic novel while Charles plans to implement a fingerprinting program at the prison—and arrange a meeting with one of its most infamous inmates, Samuel Spencer. He’s convinced that Spencer—a Scotsman who admitted to killing his wife—is, in fact, innocent. What’s more, he believes he has the evidence to prove it.

London, 1885. Amelie Hampton is a hopeless romantic, which makes her the perfect columnist to answer lonely heart letters in The Marriage Gazette. When Amelie plays matchmaker with two anonymous lonely hearts, she also decides to secretly observe the couple’s blind date. To her surprise, the man who appears for the rendezvous is Harold Radcliffe - a grieving widower and a member of Amelie’s book club.

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.

London, 1890. When the body of a wealthy widow is found in the neglected graveyard of St Anne’s Church, Soho, Emma Langley and Penny Green soon discover her respectable façade concealed a web of bitter enemies. From a disgraced doctor stripped of his livelihood to a governess whose reputation was destroyed by lies, the victim, Mrs Melbourne, left a trail of devastation in her wake. Then Mrs Melbourne’s Belgravia mansion is consumed by a mysterious fire. Emma and Penny must race to decipher water-damaged papers salvaged from the ruins that could hold the key to the truth.

Successful businessman Jeremy Marks wasn't highly regarded by any of the members of the West London Archery Club. Most of them considered him a buffoon and a bore. But everyone was stunned when the fellow was murdered during a lull in the club's annual archery competition. He'd been shot with arrows from a longbow during a raging thunderstorm. But those who knew Marks well understood that the unkempt "court jester" persona adopted by the late, unlamented man was as fake as the smile he wore.

While Kate winds her way through the elaborate manor, gaining inspiration for her next Gothic novel, Lord Charles discovers the reason behind their journey. It seems Prince Eddy, heir to the throne until his purported death in 1892, has actually been alive all these years. Deemed unfit to rule, he has been living secretly at Glamis under an assumed name. But now the prince has gone missing—on the very morning the body of one of his servants was found, her throat slashed in a manner eerily reminiscent of the Ripper's.

Two bodies have been found in a park in the fashionable London neighborhood of Callander Square. While Inspector Thomas Pitt is fighting to get the square’s aristocratic residents to speak with him, his pretty, well-born wife, Charlotte, decides to do some detective work of her own. Soon she is unearthing secrets in every house on the square, while Thomas tries to discover what would drive a person to murder.

London, 1851. With the opening of the Great Exhibition at hand, interest in mounting in the engineering triumphs of the railways, but not everyone feels like celebrating. In an audacious attack, the London to Birmingham mail train is robbed and derailed, causing many casualties. Planned with military precision, this crime proves a challenge to Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck who fights to untangle a web of murder, blackmail and destruction.

The year is 1862 and murderous desires are simmering in England. Nineteen-year-old Sarah Bonetta Forbes (Sally), once a princess of the Egbado Clan, desires one thing above all else: revenge against the British Crown and its system of colonial "humanitarianism," which stole her dignity and transformed her into royal property. From military men to political leaders, she’s vowed to ruin all who’ve had a hand in her afflictions. The top of her list? Her godmother, Britain’s mighty monarch, Queen Victoria herself.

Under a bundle of mistletoe, art collector Daniel McCourt lies with his throat slit, a bloody sword next to his body. Inspector Witherspoon is determined to solve the case - preferably before the eggnog is ladled out on Christmas Eve - but of course he will require assistance from the always sharp-witted housekeeper, Mrs. Jeffries, who has a few of her own theories on why McCourt had to die by the sword.

The past reaches out to the unlikely investigative team of Angus Brodie and Mikaela Forsythe when a man she was once engaged to marry seeks her assistance to find his young runaway son. However, a simple case of following the clues left behind becomes far more as the search unravels her former fiancé’s secrets. Mikaela is determined to find the answers.

Featuring work by M. R. James, Edith Nesbit, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Atherton and many more, this enhanced audio collection of eight enduring stories - some well-known, others less familiar - transport you to a candlelit fireside to hear tales of lonely coastlines, deadly rivers, dark, creaking corridors, horrific, everlasting love and unknown entities lurking in black velvet shadows.

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.

When young cook Kat Holloway learns that the children of London's Foundling Hospital are mysteriously disappearing and one of their nurses has been murdered, she can't turn away. She enlists the help of her charming and enigmatic confidant Daniel McAdam, who has ties to Scotland Yard, and Errol Fielding, a disreputable man from Daniel’s troubled past, to bring the killer to justice. Their investigation takes them from the grandeur of Mayfair to the slums of the East End, during which Kat learns more about Daniel and his circumstances than she ever could have imagined.

Dying is the only thing people do with any regularity, and Fiona makes her indecorous living cleaning up after the corpses are carted away. Her childhood best friend, Mary, was the last known victim of Jack the Ripper. It's been two years since Fiona scrubbed Mary's blood from the floorboards, and London is no longer buzzing about the Ripper, but Fiona hasn't forgotten. When she's called to a murder in the middle of the night, Fiona finds a victim mutilated in an eerily similar fashion to those of the Ripper, and only a few doors down from Mary's old home.

When a bomb destroys the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard, all fingers point to the increasingly brazen factions of Irish dissidents seeking liberation from English rule. Volunteering their services to the British government, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn set out to infiltrate a secret cell of the Irish Republican Brotherhood known as the Invisibles. Posing as a reclusive German bomb maker and his anarchist apprentice, they are recruited for the group's ultimate plan: to bring London to its knees and end the monarchy forever.

When Charlotte Pitt, well-born wife of Thomas Pitt, the police investigator, learned of her mother's distress in losing a locket with a compromising picture, she did not know it was the beginning of several bizarre events that would end in sudden death. For hidden behind the sumptuous elegance of Ruthland Place were terrible secrets. Secrets so horrifying that only murder could conceal them. And only the dogged persistence of Charlotte and Thomas could reveal them.

The Kern Secretarial Agency provides reliable professional services to its wealthy clientele, and Anne Clifton was one of the finest women in Ursula Kern's employ. But Miss Clifton has met an untimely end - and Ursula is convinced it was not due to natural causes.

It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody.

Inspector Witherspoon always triumphs...but how does he do it? Even the inspector himself doesn't know - because his secret weapon is as ladylike as she is clever. She's Mrs. Jeffries: the determined, delightful detective who is also Inspector Witherspoon's housekeeper.