Murder By Wire and Other Budgetary Efficiencies

A Cozy Victorian Mystery of Love and Murder

There are places one expects to find dead railway directors. The message room of the Central Telegraph Office is not supposed to be one of them.

Senior telegraph clerk Miss Clara Nevin spends her nights routing London’s secrets along humming wires, turning other people’s crises into neat lines of ink. Then Mr Arthur Lestrange of the North-Eastern Railway is discovered sitting unnaturally upright at her instrument, politely strangled with a coil of spare wire, and a single Home Office message quietly disappears from her rack. Enter Mr Elias Blackwood, discreet inquiry agent with an unnerving habit of appearing in locked rooms and in one’s satchel, and Clara’s tidy columns of figures acquire an alarming new heading: murders, costs not yet known.

As the Home Office sniffs about for scandal, Clara and Blackwood must untangle misdirected telegrams, creative accounting, and the sort of budgetary efficiencies that leave corpses where ledgers ought to be. Who slipped the wire around Lestrange’s throat without disturbing a single clerk, which missing message was worth a life, and how is anyone meant to concentrate on national security when the most distracting hazard in the room is a simmering, thoroughly improper attraction conducted at regulation distance?

Perfect for readers who enjoy:

• Witty historical whodunits and cozy Victorian mysteries

• Low heat, closed door romance with a slow, satisfying burn

• Murder, manners, and bureaucracy in full, flustered panic

If you like village scandal energy but prefer your setting upgraded to a London office with better hats, Murder By Wire and Other Budgetary Efficiencies delivers tidy deaths, dry humour, and the frankly indecent pleasure of watching the paperwork lose control.