Victorian Suspense

Born with fragile health, Dawn Uxbridge has lived a sheltered existence. Her lonely days are filled by drawing fanciful landscapes and nurturing plants. When tragedy strikes, she finds herself alone and penniless with only one talent - a green thumb. Jasper, the Earl of Seton, is in need of a gardener to reclaim his derelict estate in the remote west of England. He expected a robust commoner, not a fragile young woman.

The widowed Duchess of Sailer has desires that are hard to fill in polite society. To that effect, she visits a brothel to have her bottom reddened. If word got out, her reputation would be ruined. So, when a member of society is murdered, and her name turns up in the books he is using to blackmail people, the metropolitan police show up on her doorstep. Olivia does the only thing she can to keep her name from being dragged through the mud: she agrees to take the investigator into her life so she can help him find a killer. Inspector Rupert McKinley expects to get in and out, and figure out who killed Lord Ethan. He doesn't care about Olivia's desires...until he starts to spend time with her, and realizes she's more interesting than he ever expected her to be. When their business relationship turns into a personal one, Rupert is determined to find the murderer before someone else - like Olivia - is killed.

London, 1907: Die junge Adlige Victoria lebt allein mit dem Butler ihres verstorbenen Vaters. Sie halten sich über Wasser, indem Victoria als Fotografin und Hopkins bei einer Zeitung arbeitet. Als auf einem Ball hässliche Andeutungen über ein dunkles Familiengeheimnis laut werden, kommt es zum Eklat - und Victoria gerät gar unter Mordverdacht.

April 1865. Having been an eyewitness to the assassination of President Lincoln, Matthew Grand, a former captain of the 3rd Cavalry of the Potomac, has come to London on an undercover assignment to hunt down the assassin's coconspirators. Ambitious young journalist Jim Batchelor has been charged with writing a feature article on the visiting American. Both men are distracted from their missions by the discovery of a body in London's Soho district.

This gripping historical crime fiction novel, based on fact, is set in Bradford, England, 1888. It explores the horrific murder of Johnny Gill; a murder and mutilation so gruesome, it stuns a nation. Even hardened detectives are affected by its savagery, swiftly comparing it to the work of Jack the Ripper.

When 18-year-old Eliza Cross agrees to visit her school friend, Lady Celia, at her home for the summer, it's immediately clear how out of place she is at Caerdon Abbey. Eliza, orphan and charity student, can't help feeling different from the aristocracy who are living their lives in luxury. But when Celia's brother, Alan, the handsome Duke of Caerdon, comes home from France, Eliza finds herself irresistibly attracted to him - especially after he disciplines her on the very first morning after they meet.

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.

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.

With the scandalous nature of her birth to live down, Isabella Fairmont dreams of a proper marriage—even if a passionless one. She saves her deepest desires for the novel she dares to pen, wherein a handsome lord with dark powers seduces her. But then her courtship with an appropriate suitor is threatened by the sudden attentions of the reclusive Earl of Black… whose pale blue eyes and brooding sensuality are exactly as she described in her book.

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.

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.

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.

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.