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

A marble Apollo should not fall on a patron in the middle of a tasteful Mayfair preview. It certainly should not do so in Lord Darnwick’s brand new Hellenic Society rooms while half the ton is watching and the victim is a man who has been hinting all evening that he is about to ruin someone important. This is a cozy Regency mystery of love, murder, and very badly behaved antiquities. Miss Adelaide Pembroke, impoverished gentlewoman and professional copyist of ancient inscriptions, is paid to notice small things. Uneven wedges under a plinth. Dust disturbed in the wrong direction. Patrons ...

A Sunday sermon in the village of Redfield should involve hymns, not a man collapsing at the foot of the pulpit while his “heart draught” perfumes the air with bitter almonds. Naturally, the congregation responds with prayer, panic, and the swift conviction that someone else is to blame. Rosamund Keeley, the vicar’s daughter, has a weakness for order, ink, and other dangerous substances. So when poison starts masquerading as respectable medicine, she does what any sensible woman would do: she makes lists. Illnesses, households, dinners, debts, grudges. Unfortunately, the village would...

Cheltenham is meant to cure delicate lungs, not finish off guests behind a pianoforte. Miss Verity Sedgewick, Lady Dowager Barham’s overworked social secretary, can organise a drawing room with a card tray and a smile. Unfortunately, someone has organised a death the same way: neatly, quietly, and with the sort of poison that leaves everyone insisting it must have been a faint. Deputy coroner and surgeon Gideon Wainwright refuses to call murder “unfortunate”; Verity refuses to let the town invent a prettier story. Together they sift calling cards, stolen names, and poisoned tea, while...

The lion sneezes, the viscount dies tidily, and Miss Imogen Aldridge would very much like everyone to stop implying these facts are related. As a clergyman’s daughter and uncredited assistant to the Tower of London menagerie, she is meant to sketch lions, not explain why a peer of the realm has been found neatly strangled in a locked inner corridor with her spare key obligingly in the door. Unfortunately for Imogen, the Crown has sent Mr Felix Seward, a very calm, very inconvenient inspector who thinks in ledgers and does not believe in accidents. Between them lie: an enraged but innocent...

Miss Elinor Gresham makes ghosts for a living. It is the living men who cause trouble. Fake ghosts, real corpses, deeply inconvenient feelings. Hired to stage elegant terrors in a ruined cliff top chapel, Elinor arrives at Wynthorpe Castle with her lenses, her invoices, and very little patience for talk of curses. The duke needs his houseguests terrified of a fashionable White Lady and impressed by his proposed harbour, not whispering about bad luck and walking away with their money. Unfortunately, once the lights are arranged and the gauze is hung, someone obligingly provides a very real ...

Larkspur Hall wants a quiet redemption: a reformed sea lord, a curated Christmas guest list, a new housekeeper with keys at her waist and nothing left to lose. It receives a corpse on polished boards, a snowstorm that seals every exit, and Cecilia Arden calmly deciding the house is hers to defend. His past vanished with a condemned ship and a missing report; her future depends on order, accounts, obedience. The first death is almost courteous. The attempts that follow are not. Shelves loosen. Leather parts. Laudanum thins. Every guest has touched the old scandal, profited from it, or buried...

On a lonely cliff above the harbour, Crowthorne Observatory is meant to produce neat numbers and impressed Admirals, not corpses in the courtyard. Cassia Fenwick, resident calculator with an inconvenient conscience, is already in trouble for insisting the western chronometer tell the truth. When the director walks up to the rooftop for a triumphant comet demonstration and instead takes a very efficient one way trip over the parapet, her columns of figures become the least comfortable thing in the building. Enter Captain Edmund Verney, the Board of Longitude’s problem solver of last resort...

If anyone insists Christmas at Drury Lane is wholesome, do not look above the scenery. Miss Sybil Merriweather, wardrobe mistress and sworn enemy of insolent seams, can mend a sagging stocking in three stitches and silence a chorus with one look. She cannot, however, persuade the theatre’s fake snow to stay in its sack, or its leading man’s waistcoat buttons to stop tattling. “Buttons are honest creatures. They told the truth when men did not.” The season, naturally, takes that as a challenge. Enter Gideon Ashe of the Society for the Improvement of Public Morals, armed with ...

Mrs Phoebe Hartwell, widowed apothecary and unofficial village doctor, is quite used to keeping Hartleigh alive with nothing more than herbs, vinegar, and stubbornness. What she is not used to is a tall, inconveniently attractive Scottish physician arriving from Edinburgh under a cloud of disgrace… or a steward dropping dead after taking her sleeping draught while half the parish is polishing its Sunday shoes. When Mr Pritchard fails to wake up and smells suspiciously of bitter almonds, Phoebe’s neat world tips sideways. Sir Montague wants the death declared natural, the coroner wants ...

Newmarket has rules: horses run, gentlemen cheat politely, and anyone named Linton keeps her head down and her ledger up to date. When the favourite for the Prince’s Cup collapses in his stall and the odds on half the card start behaving like they know the future, Beatrice Linton’s quiet gift for numbers puts her squarely between a killer and the Jockey Club. Tasked with untangling a trail of anonymous wagers and one very dead four-legged darling, Beatrice finds herself in reluctant partnership with Sir Rowan Delacourt, the Club’s resident conscience in perfectly tied linen. He wants ...

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...

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 ...

One dead patron. One poisonous Palm House. One inspector who keeps noticing the same woman. The difficulty with unveiling a grand new Palm House is that someone invariably decides to die in it before the tea has been poured. When Lady Helena Westerleigh collapses face first into Briarwick Conservatory’s prize orchid at the opening ceremony, polite society blames the heat, the brass railings, and possibly the sandwiches, in that order. Miss Beatrice Elwood, botanical illustrator and reluctant expert in poisonous foliage, quietly notices the wrong spores on the right gloves and realises the...

The Ladies’ Minerva Library is very keen on improving the female mind. It is much less keen on having a dead clergyman flattened under a bookcase in the restricted pamphlet room. Especially when the room was locked, the pamphlets are loudly against novels, and the keys were in Eleanor Pryce’s sensible pocket the whole time. Eleanor, assistant librarian and quiet smuggler of scandalous Gothics to deserving matrons, has two problems. First, a righteous reverend who has obligingly become a locked room murder in the pamphlet room. Second, Henry Blackwood, a dangerously charming publisher ...

Proper young ladies are meant to perfect their French verbs, not witness a murder by chocolate at a ladies’ academy. Lydia Ashcroft, fallen gentlewoman and ruthlessly competent instructress, has three priorities: keep Madame Rochfort’s Academy solvent, keep thirty girls from disgracing themselves over the tea things, and keep her younger brother in school. When their most important patron keels over during morning chocolate in a very final fashion, Lydia smells more than a weak heart. Cups have moved, chocolate smells wrong, and the magistrate is distressingly keen to call it Providence...

A fiancé, a corpse, and a house party that is not allowed to go home. Clemency Harrow does not object to marriage in principle; she simply prefers not to be traded for canal shares and an allegedly reformed rake before breakfast. Packed off to Ashbourne Hall to meet her scandalous intended, she expects awkward teas, pious small talk, and a jury of relatives deciding whether she is worthy of a disreputable earl with an excellent jawline. Instead, her most tedious cousin keels over in the pudding course. The wine becomes the most discussed guest at table, the blancmange looks guilty, and ...

Lights, camera, corpse; Primrose Studios is meant to uplift the nation’s morals, not leave a patron strangled in the wardrobe between the sackcloth and the velvet. Respectable pictures are hard enough to sell without a moral reformer dying in the costumes and threatening to ruin the box office from beyond the grave. Clara Ashcombe, junior scenario writer and reluctant conscience of London’s most improving picture house, spends her days trimming sins for the censors and adding railings to staircases. When Miss Temperance Vale of the Society for the Improvement of Modern Amusements turns ...

Dead satirist, thawing hearts, absolutely frozen toes: welcome to the cozy Regency mystery set on the Thames when London decides the river is a perfectly sensible place for a Christmas fair. Anne Redgrave sells improving tracts on the front of her Frost Fair stall and anonymous political broadsides under the counter. When a notorious satirist is crushed beneath his neatly sabotaged booth, Anne finds herself with a dead neighbour, a very dangerous engraving in hiding, and the unwelcome attention of Mr Hawke of the Thames River Police, who disapproves of almost everything except inconvenient ...

Miniaturist Dorothea Pemberton is paid to make people look better than they deserve. Unfortunately, when a gilded portrait and its temperamental critic share a private viewing at the Royal Academy, the critic drops dead behind the curtain and Dorothea is the only one in the room who notices that the cracks in the paint are lying. Dragged into the scandal by a duke with an inconvenient conscience, Dorothea finds herself assisting Lucian Fallowfield and a dryly amused Bow Street runner as they peel back layers of altered varnish, reworked faces, and very expensive secrets. A restorer who ...

On Drury Lane's brightest night, the Lord Chamberlain's censor walks into the property room alive and leaves flattened under a fallen backdrop, script of a new satire still in his hand. Miss Eliza March, printer's daughter turned reluctant poor relation, only wanted to see star comedian Nathaniel Quill at work; instead she finds a dead official, a damaged rope, and a theatre full of people who would prefer the whole thing quietly labelled an accident. With Bow Street on its way and the licence hanging by a frayed line, Eliza's inconvenient eye for detail drags her into an uneasy partnership...