Showing results by narrator "Sarah Nichols" in All Categories

A lonely young heiress becomes the poorest wealthy woman in Victorian England when her father dies without telling anyone where he hid his fortune. Can Tressa and the no-nonsense estate manager find the fortune before the greedy relatives get to it first? Tressa Harlowe's father did not trust banks, but neither did he trust his greedy extended family. He kept his vast fortune hidden somewhere on his estate in the south of England and died suddenly, without telling anyone where he had concealed it.

When business magnate Robert Jeffreys announces his investment in airships, he hosts a promotional flight for a group of reporters. Working undercover in the crew is retired spy Augusta Peel. She’d rather be working on her book repair business, but Inspector Fisher of Scotland Yard has persuaded her to help with a surveillance operation. The press trip on the airship takes a turn when a body is found in a cabin. Can Augusta identify the murderer? It’s tricky to find a motive among the sophisticated passengers—some of them are sophisticated liars, too.

Society believes the worst of Justin Alastair, the notorious Duke of Avon. When he encounters a young boy, Léon, who is running from his abusive brother, Avon employs the boy as his page, parading him around parties and other society events in full view of his bitter rival, the Comte de Saint-Vire. But the truth is soon uncovered: Léon is a girl named Léonie and is actually the legitimate child of the Comte and his wife. While Avon is intent on his plan to reveal the Comte’s duplicity and ruin him, he is charmed by Léonie’s kindness, falls in love, and becomes a changed man.

When amateur sleuth Augusta Peel receives a mysterious letter about a missing young woman, she can’t resist helping with the search. But the case takes a turn when an art student is found dead in a Bloomsbury square. Could the murder have something to do with Augusta’s investigation? The more questions she asks, the fewer answers she receives. Someone’s hiding something.

Rosalind Thorne has slowly but assuredly gained a reputation as "a useful woman" - by helping respectable women out of some less-than-respectable predicaments. Her latest endeavor is a tragedy waiting to happen. Desperate Margaretta Seymore is with child - and her husband is receiving poisoned pen letters that imply that her condition is the result of an affair with the notorious actor Fletcher Cavendish.

London’s bright young things are partying, Soho’s nightlife is buzzing, and Augusta Peel is hiding in her basement. She has a reason to hide there: it’s home to her Bloomsbury workshop where she repairs old, neglected books. After a busy time during the war, all Augusta wants is peace and quiet. But events take a turn when Augusta agrees to chaperone nineteen-year-old Harriet Jones on a date. Failing to get her home on time, she ends up in a riotous nightclub. She can’t imagine the evening getting much worse when the police raid it. But then the murder happens.

England, late 1547. King Henry VIII is dead. His 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth is living with the king's widow, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Seymour is the brother of Henry VIII's third wife, the late Jane Seymour, who was the mother to the now-ailing boy king. Ambitious and dangerous, Seymour begins an overt flirtation with Elizabeth that ends with Catherine sending her away. When Catherine dies a year later and Seymour is arrested for treason soon after, a scandal explodes.

May 1940. Hitler invades France, a move that threatens all of Europe, and three lives intersect at Wickwythe Hall, an opulent estate in the English countryside - a beautiful French refugee, a take-charge American heiress, and a charming champagne vendeur with ties to Roosevelt and Churchill who isn't what he seems. There, secrets and unexpected liaisons unfold, until a shocking tragedy in a far-off Algerian port binds them forever....

Raina Bretton is a rag woman in London's East End when a handsome stranger appears in a dank alley and offers her a glittering smile and a chance for adventure. Rothburne Abbey has a unique position for her, one that will take her away from her hardscrabble life and give her a chance to be a lady. Things she could only dream of might be coming true. But some dreams turn out to be nightmares. Though Raina has traded squalor for silk and satin, something about the abbey is deeply unsettling.

In London 1946, the Right Sort Marriage Bureau is just beginning to take off, and the proprietors, Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, are in need of a bigger office and a secretary to handle the growing demand. Unfortunately, they don’t yet have the necessary means. So when a woman arrives - a cousin of Gwen’s - with an interesting and quite remunerative proposition, they two of them are all ears. The cousin, one Lady Matheson, works for the queen in “some capacity” and is in need of some discreet investigation.

Looking into the past, the Crusades seem incomprehensible. What combination of religious fervor, hatred of people of different faiths, and gall led Europeans of AD 1100 to make their way thousands of miles to conquer the Holy Land? Why did they continue for 200 years? How did the Crusades change the world? The intriguing story is peppered with colorful characters. Over the centuries crusaders saw - and participated in - the evolution of warfare and the transformation of society from feudal fiefdoms to nations and empires.

In London, 1946, the Right Sort Marriage Bureau is getting on its feet and expanding. Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge are making a go of it. That is until Lord Bainbridge—the widowed Gwen’s father-in-law and legal guardian—returns from a business trip to Africa and threatens to undo everything important to her, even sending her six-year-old son away to a boarding school. But there’s more going on than that.

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family - a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of 20th-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Emmeline and William Pershing have enjoyed a perfectly convenient marriage for eight years. Their relationship is a seamless blend of their talents and goals. They’ve settled into separate, well-ordered lives beneath the same roof, and are content to stay that way―or so Emmeline thinks. And if William has secretly longed for a bit more from the woman he adores, he’s managed to be content with her supreme skills as a hostess and planner, which has helped him advance his career.

Henry VIII ruled England from 1509 to 1547. As a young man, he was fond of sports and hunting and was said to be uncommonly handsome. Standing more than six feet tall, he loomed large in the lives and minds of his subjects as he navigated his country through the tricky diplomatic and military hazards of the 16th century.

Returning home to England from New York, Margot finds her family in chaos. Her cousin Chloe is in prison awaiting trial for murdering her twin sister, Claudia, their mother has withdrawn into the imaginary world of her romance novels, Claudia’s 14-year-old daughter has regressed to early childhood and refuses to leave her bed, and to top it all off, the family cat has decided to live with the neighbors. As Chloe’s trial approaches, the atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly fraught, and Margot begins to wonder whether someone else is responsible for Claudia’s death.

Dame Cecile Savoy's "revolting floor mop" of a Pekinese has passed away at a ripe old age. Now, the aging British actress convinces her rivals on stage and screen, Trixie and Evangeline, to support her in her hour of grief...by accompanying her to a taxidermist. But it's a cab ride straight to a cat-astrope! No sooner do the three elderly thespians enter "Stuff Yours" than they discover a dead body, a live kitty in a cage, and flames bursting from the back room. Fortunately for a rare Japanese bobtail called Cho-Cho-San, Trixie grabs the cat before fleeing the scene.

In a London slowly recovering from the ravages of World War II, two very different women join forces to launch a business venture in the heart of Mayfair - The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. Miss Iris Sparks, avuncular and unmarried, and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, practical and widowed with a young son, are determined to achieve some independence and do some good in a rapidly changing world. But the promising start to their marriage bureau is threatened when their newest client is found murdered and the man arrested for the crime is the prospective husband they matched her with.

Political unrest permeates York at the cusp of the 15th century, as warring factions take sides on who should be the rightful king - Richard II or his estranged, powerful cousin in exile, Henry Bolingbroke. Independent-minded 20-year-old Kate Clifford is struggling to dig out from beneath the debt left by her late husband. Determined to find a way to be secure in her own wealth and establish her independence in a male-dominated society, Kate turns one of her properties near the minster into a guesthouse and sets up a business.

Miss Sparks finds herself followed, then approached, by a young woman who has a very personal connection to a former paramour of Sparks. But something is amiss, and it seems that Iris’s past may well cause something far more deadly than mere disruption in her personal life. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn is struggling to regain full legal control of her life, her finances, and her son—a legal path strewn with traps and pitfalls.