Victorian Suspense

Facing court-martial for disobeying orders, Lieutenant Samuel Kingston despairs when avaricious aristocrats imprison his father for a crime born of Samuel’s clash with one of their own as a boy. The young Anglo-Irishman’s only hope of freeing both is accepting a commission assisting William Walker and his filibusters win Nicaragua’s bloody civil war.

Cassie Woods has been assigned her first big article after the success of her first two investigations. She dives in, eager to prove herself as a journalist in the male-dominated world of 1880s New York City. Her relationship with the handsome but infuriating Detective O'Neill seems promising, but when she discovers that O'Neill is investigating her father for corruption, she must choose whom to side with and whom to protect. Will she be able to solve both cases and save her family's reputation?

Princess Luisa has devoted her life to duty, quietly preparing to succeed her father as ruler. Nothing, however, primed her to live on the run, disguised as a personal secretary to a notorious English scoundrel. The earl is just the man to help her reclaim her throne, but Luisa is drawn to her powerful employer in ways she could never imagine.

The year is 1873, and Sybil Ingram has come to a crossroads. Once she was the toast of the London stage, but now that she's 28 years old - very well, nearly 30 - her draw isn't what it used to be, and her theater troupe is foundering. When her trusted mentor asks her to take the blame for his financial misdeeds, Sybil sees no choice but to retire from the life she loves and move to America to marry New York City hotel magnate Alcott Lammle.

After the mysterious death of her father, Miss Gillian Young takes a new job as the principal costume designer at the renowned Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. But while she remembers her father as a kind, well-respected man of the Police Force, clues she uncovers indicate he'd been living a double life: a haunting photograph of a young woman, train stubs for secret trips just before his death, and a receipt for a large sum of money. Are these items evidence of her father's guilty secrets? His longtime police partner thinks so.

Five years after releasing the love of his life to another man, the Duke of Surrey struggles with deep remorse about his past decisions. Chained in a loveless marriage of convenience and strangled by duty, he wallows in regret and drink. Everything in his life changes, when on holiday in Paris, he meets a young boy and his former rival. Suddenly, he finds himself thrown into a whirlwind of deceit and lies as he searches for the meaning of truth and love. Just like innocence, deception carries a price.

Saddled with Chloe Gresham, his beautiful and irresponsible young ward, Sir Hugo Lattimer, a man driven by dark memories and a tormenting despair, has no intention of caring for her - until he falls in love.

Iain Sinclair, Marquis of Alynwick, is certain there is a special hell for him. An unrepentant rake, he holds nothing sacred - except for beautiful Elizabeth York. For years, Alynwick has tried to forget the woman he loved so well, and treated so badly. A woman who could hold nothing in her heart for him but hatred. All of society believes Elizabeth, the blind daughter of a duke, to be a proper young lady. But no one knows of her wanton affair with Alynwick.

A book of passion, of 16th century England, of greed and political ambition unto death. Historians and novelists have written extensively about the various aspects of Queen Elizabeth I’s long, rich, and tumultuous life. No one has ever given us a fully realized portrait of the greatest English monarch as a young girl. Concluding her brilliant Tudor trilogy, Robin Maxwell enters this new territory by introducing Elizabeth as a romantic and vulnerable teenager dangerously awakening to sexuality with the wrong man.

Lucy Ashton had long ago given up her quest for true love. In the rarified society of Victorian England, Lucy plays the game—flirting, dancing and dabbling in the newly fashionable spiritualism. Even marrying when—and who—she’s supposed to. If the stuffy Duke of Sussex cannot spark the passion she craves, he can at least give her a family, a home of her own, and a place to belong. But when her polite marriage reveals a caring and sensual man, Lucy begins to wonder if she can indeed have it all.

Autumn, 1888. While the city is horrified by Jack the Ripper's murder spree another, less publicized killer is at large. Each murder takes place right after the Ripper killings, as the murderer appears to be taking advantage of the lack of police resources to tackle two major investigations at the same time. Inspector Albert Norris is charged with bringing the railway killer to justice, but clues are few and the killer's motive unclear.

Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula’s Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanity’s oldest supernatural obsession. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising and often legendary cast, including Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as lost gems by forgotten masters such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and W. F. Harvey. Amelia B. Edwards’s chilling story gives the collection its title, while Ambrose Bierce ("The Moonlit Road"), Elizabeth Gaskell ("The Old Nurse’s Story"), and W. W. Jacobs ("The Monkey’s Paw") will turn you white as a sheet. With a skillful introduction to the genre and notes on each story by Sims, The Phantom Coach is a spectacular collection of ghostly Victorian thrills.

A young banker, by the name of Mr Charles Petrie, returned home after riding his horse to dine with his wife, Grace, and her companion, Mrs Quinn. During and after dinner he had nothing to excite him save the receipt of a letter which somewhat annoyed him, and that his wife consumed rather more wine than he considered to be good for her health. Immediately after retiring to his room, he was seized with symptoms of irritant poisoning, and despite every effort made on his behalf, he succumbed to its effects.

When her soulmate, Jonathan August-Trelawney jilts her at the altar, Lily Pond is determined to live life on her own terms. Her friends aren’t afraid of giving their opinions, encouraging her to find someone else to marry, and swiftly. Lily has other ideas.

Clayton Barbour, the narrator, is a protected bourgeois son just weak enough to allow himself to be overwhelmed by a sly, dissembling force of evil, just strong enough to be constantly tormented by his weakness. Invited to a séance by a casual acquaintance, Moore, who sees in him a psychic force, he becomes the inadvertent victim of Moore's wife's contact with a channeled malignant force.

When lady’s maid Marian Osley and footman Valentine Hobbs assume their positions at the cliff-top estate of Valor Rise, they already share a history. Raised together as paupers in a London workhouse, they indulged in S&M games of imaginary crimes and sublime punishment. Now they’ve been unexpectedly reunited - in subservience to the brooding Wythe Bornholdt and his frail wife, Diana. A master and mistress with their own dark secrets.

This short story in the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series features one of the most beloved characters in the series, as well as giving the listener a tour of the boardinghouse itself. Chronologically, this story come soon after the events in Scholarly Pursuits, so if you don't like spoilers, you might want to wait to listen to it until you have finished that book.

It’s January 1881, and while the grownups in Annie and Nate Dawson’s San Francisco O’Farrell Street boardinghouse are busy with their own affairs, two boys and a dog find their own adventure. Ian Hennessey, a poor boy from South of Market, who is trying to shoulder a man’s responsibilities, gets in trouble, and his best friend, Jamie Hewitt, does what he can to help. But it is Jamie’s young Boston Terrier, Dandy, who saves the day.

England, 1866: Die 18-jährige Felicia kann es kaum erwarten, nach zwei ereignislosen Jahren endlich ihre Mädchenschule zu verlassen und die Reise zur Hochzeit ihres Bruders anzutreten. Statt gemütlich im Zug nach Gloucester zu reisen, findet sie sich jedoch plötzlich in einer Kutsche eingepfercht durch einen verlassenen Wald polternd. Ein unerwarteter Zwischenstopp endet in einer Katastrophe: Ein Mitreisender wird tot aufgefunden. Schnell wird klar, dass es sich nicht um einen harmlosen Unfall handelt. Ein Mord ist geschehen und nur einer von Felicias Mitreisenden kann der Täter gewesen sein.

When not performing two sold-out shows every night, Music Hall Steampunk illusionists and consultants to Scotland Yard, slick-talking Michael Magister and the feisty Phoebe Le Breton, must solve the crime of the century, while saving the nation from a conclave of fiendish psychopaths led by the crazed renegade Jesuit known only as "The Black Bishop".