Mostrando resultados por autor "Marisa Paxon" en Todas las categorías

The violins keep losing the tune, the marmalade cakes are a health hazard, and Miss Julia Amberley’s quiet social exile in Bath has just tripped over a corpse. When the man who once ruined her life drops dead beside the Assembly Rooms supper table, sticky with ratafia and orange peel, Julia finds herself exactly where polite society likes her least: at the center of the scandal, with her hand inconveniently near the body and half the room eager to improve the story. Captain Miles Rutland, cavalry officer turned master of ceremonies, has one job: keep Bath’s entertainments orderly and ...

The breakfast bells start clanging. They are not announcing toast. They are announcing trouble. Prudence Ashdown runs Bramblewick House on keys, rules, and the firm belief that titled guests should be seen and never heard tugging a bell pull like a dying swan. So when the stillroom key vanishes, Lord Rafe Kesterton, Marquess of Vellamere, responds with his favorite pastime: expecting perfection from other people’s hands. Polite society adores order, especially when someone else is breaking a sweat to maintain it. Then Prudence opens the stillroom and finds a dead butler, a tea tray set ...

An Egyptian mummy unwrapping is supposed to be Lord Caddington’s latest after dinner amusement; instead he lifts the lid on a cozy Regency murder and finds his loudest enemy lying there, freshly strangled and inconveniently modern. The newspapers will call it a tragedy. The guests call it a scandal. Miss Isabel Fairleigh, impoverished knight’s daughter and uninvited cataloguer of his Egyptian collection, quietly calls it a puzzle. Flirtation, hieroglyphics, and one very opinionated corpse. Now the gallery doors are locked, Bow Street is on the way, and rumours of smuggling and blackmail...

A locked-room Regency murder is a dreadful inconvenience when you are a young widow trying to persuade three opinionated men that you can build a canal without fainting on the paperwork. Lady Seraphina Vale opens her map room to find an ink-stained corpse, a locked door, vanished deeds, and figures on her plans quietly altered. With investors sniffing for weakness and a magistrate keen on simple stories, Seraphina turns to the only man in the house who understands locks, footsteps, and human misbehaviour: her butler, Tobias Rook. He controls the keys, he reads a room the way others read ...

The trouble with dressing the ton is that sometimes they stop breathing before they settle the bill. Senior seamstress Lydia Hart is very good at her job: she keeps court trains from tripping debutantes, tempers from fraying, and account books from lying. Then Viscountess Dalrymple collapses mid curtsey in Madame Follet’s Bond Street fitting room, sugared almonds on her breath and a suspiciously elegant court gown on her back. Bow Street wants to know who poured the tea, why the comfits now taste of trouble, and why the sharp eyed girl with the pins keeps noticing things that are not in ...

Christmas at the Albion Grand is meant to sell railway shares and hot punch, not watch Father Christmas lie very still at the bottom of the stairs while the staff Christmas fund quietly fails to add up. Miss Agnes Trelawney, temporary governess and full time collector of inconvenient details, was only hired to keep Jasper Melbury’s children from alarming the shareholders. Instead she notices an over polished bannister, a missing seventy eight pounds six shillings, and a dead accounts clerk who had been asking the wrong people the right questions. When the company sends Hugh Ashcombe, its ...

This season, death comes in your size. At Montague’s Emporium on Regent Street, the Christmas window is meant to display gowns, not corpses. When junior window dresser Hester Linwood reaches in to straighten a mannequin and finds cold flesh and a very real bruise, she ruins the unveiling, horrifies the crowd, and earns the focused attention of two men: her impeccably tailored employer, Julian Montague, and an inspector who distrusts both instalment plans and spectacle. With Montague’s reputation on the line, a rival store smirking across the road, and half the staff hiding awkward ...

A fog choked inn, a locked room, and a bride who really should not be dead. On a fog choked autumn night, the Allerton Posting Inn is crammed with dripping travelers, reckless card players, and one banker’s bride who insists her jewels are safer than the Bank of England. Miss Margaret Allerton intends only to keep the coaches fed and the guests polite; murder is very much not on the schedule. By morning, the jewels are untouched, the bedchamber is locked from within, and Miss Celia Bristow is lying very still in the best room with a bruised neck that does not match the rest of her ...

House parties are all harmless flirtation until a guest turns up dead in the ornamental fountain and the household bell only rings for fire or death. Miss Eliza Fairburn comes to Foxglove Court for respectable employment, not village scandal: companion to Lady Ashcombe, watcher of tedious card parties, and firmly resolved not to be impressed by the Marquess of Rothley or his inconveniently blue eyes. Then his charming cousin is found with a broken neck in the fountain court, three years after a steward’s son “accidentally” fell from the west gallery, and everyone suddenly prefers the ...

Tea is meant to soothe, not identify a suspect, yet a gentleman expires on Lady Helena Foxe’s Mayfair carpet and helpfully leaves a note branding her a “THREAT.” How very considerate. With her Season already wobbling on the edge of scandal, Helena does what any sensible young lady would do: she starts a ledger, sharpens her tongue, and decides she would rather solve the problem than be “handled” by it. Enter Elias Grant, a Bow Street man who insists on behaving like a caller, asking ruinous questions with impeccable calm and a frankly inadequate coat. The corpse leads to discreet ...

Brighton is very good at pretending its scandals are sea breezes. The sea, unfortunately, has just washed up a columnist who knows everyone’s secrets and will no longer be improving anyone’s breakfast. Miss Honoria Finch, impoverished gentlewoman and unwilling expert in duchess management, only meant to hold a shawl and mind her own thoughts. Now a drowned gossip writer lies at her feet with her private letter clenched in his hand and the Prince Regent’s private secretary is asking very quiet, very dangerous questions. If Honoria cannot help Arthur Deverell untangle forged invitations...

Christmas at the London Foundling Hospital was meant to produce warm feelings and acceptable expenses, not a treasurer lying dead beside the subscription ledger in a locked committee room. When the key is still in the inner lock and the floor is spattered in something that is definitely not ink, polite society would very much like to look away. Unfortunately for them, Lady Arabella St Clair has a head for accounts and an inconvenient conscience. Newly widowed and fiercely practical, Arabella has two sacred beliefs: sums should add up, and children should not pay for gentlemen’s broken ...

Vauxhall Gardens after dark is supposed to provide music, scandal, and fireworks, not an inconvenient corpse in the middle of the promenade. Unfortunately for everyone, Charlotte Penbury is on duty with a tray, a borrowed maid’s gown, and a sketchbook full of London’s worst secrets when a moralising Member of Parliament ends his evening by becoming headline material instead of writing it. Charlotte earns her bread as a political caricaturist with an unhelpful habit of drawing exactly what she sees. Sebastian Harcourt earns his as the Home Office’s tidiest problem solver, sent to ...

A nosy neighbour, a newly returned duke, and a corpse arranged in his ruined abbey like an unwanted delivery. Miss Tabitha Grey only meant to observe Merrow Abbey from a safe distance with her spyglass, her herbarium, and her aunt’s steady disapproval. Then Gabriel Merrow comes home from war, inherits a crumbling estate, and immediately acquires a dead man on cold stone. When the village constable runs out of authority by lunchtime, Tabitha steps in, mostly out of civic duty and partly because she cannot leave well enough alone. A missing satchel, a locked stillroom, poison that should ...

One seaside assignment. One ruined photograph. One very inconvenient corpse. Edith Fairleigh is supposed to write about wholesome seaside amusements; instead she steps off the train at Westcliff to find suffragettes rehearsing on a failing pier, electric lights that explode if stared at too sternly, and a patroness who cares more about her profile than public safety. The Majestic Pier Pavilion promises a tasteful charity tableaux and a photographic record of civic virtue; it delivers one dead body and several very compromising glass plates. When a prominent supporter of the pier’s nearly ...