A Very Restorative Murder at the Royal Hydropathic

A Cozy Edwardian Mystery of Love and Murder

Hydrotherapy is meant to soothe the nerves, not drown the investors. At the Royal Hydropathic, it has started doing both. Come for the cure, stay murdered.

Miss Beatrice Harrow, lady physician with a talent for calm diagnoses and inconvenient honesty, expects difficult lungs, sulky vapour, and guests who cheat on their prescribed walks. She does not expect Alderman Josiah Frobisher, the hotel’s loudest shareholder, to be found very quiet indeed in the grand marble bath after a “restorative” treatment. The water smells wrong, the electrical apparatus looks offensively innocent, and the list of people tired of being shouted at over pudding is impressively long. Cold baths are one thing; cold blood is quite another.

Pressed to protect both patients and profits, Beatrice is pushed into a wary alliance with Mr Lionel Pembroke, the impeccably controlled manager who rearranges scandal with the same precision he applies to the hotel stationery. Was the alderman killed for his money, his opinions, or his habit of treating every room as a committee meeting; who slipped murder into a regimen of douches, vapours, and carefully advertised cures; and what happens to Beatrice’s hard won post if the Royal Hydropathic becomes famous for all the wrong reasons?

A Very Restorative Murder at the Royal Hydropathic is a cozy Edwardian mystery of spa town scandal, dark humour, and low heat, slow burn romance, perfect for readers who like witty historical whodunits, clever, capable heroines, emotionally competent men in inconvenient waistcoats, murder tidy rather than gory, and the bedroom door firmly and reassuringly shut.

At the Royal Hydropathic Hotel, the water promises miracles; Dr Beatrice Harrow promises the truth, which is considerably less soothing. The baths steam, the shareholders preen, and the patients pay handsomely to be wrapped in wet sheets and optimism. Then, hours after threatening to expose some highly creative cure statistics, the hotel’s most important investor is found very inconveniently dead in Bath Seven. Come for the cure, stay murdered.

Beatrice is certain his heart had help stopping; hotel manager Lionel Pembroke is equally certain a scandal will drown them all. With the police sniffing around the treatment rooms, a furious young widow, a senior doctor who likes his numbers miraculous, and an entire spa of guests who heard Sir Bertram’s threats, every glass of mineral water starts to look like evidence. If Beatrice and Lionel cannot untangle the lies before the inquest, the Royal’s reputation will sink, her hard won medical career will go under, his future as a respectable man will vanish, and someone very determined to stay cured of exposure is quite prepared to strike again.

A witty, clue rich cozy Edwardian mystery of love and murder, this is a fair play mystery with a dry, darkly comic tone, non gory deaths, and a closed door slow burn romance with a happy for now ending and a sparring partnership between a lady doctor and the hotel manager she keeps morally upgrading against his will. Perfect for readers who enjoy sharp tongued heroines, reluctant partners in crime solving, dangerous ledgers, and historical cozies where the banter is as satisfying as the solution, A Very Restorative Murder at the Royal Hydropathic invites you to run a bath, settle in, and start reading before the water gets cold.