Cozy Regency Mystery

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 ...

Someone is snatching priceless jewels right off the necks of British aristocrats. With his intimate access to the parlors and bedrooms of Regency London, the Richmond Thief strikes again and again. The Bow Street Runners, the city's only detectives, seem powerless to stop him. Enter Althea, lady scientist. As the young widow of a country gentleman, Lady Althea Trent is introduced to the upper-class social scene as yet another pretty face. But her own scientific inquiries and an invitation to act as an agent of Bow Street propel her into the hunt for the Richmond Thief.

As much as Beatrice Hyde-Clare relished the challenge of figuring out who murdered a fellow guest during a house party in the Lake District, she certainly does not consider herself an amateur investigator. So when a London dandy falls dead at her feet in the entryway of a London Daily Gazette, she feels no compulsion to investigate. It was a newspaper office, after all, and reporters are already on the case as are the authorities.

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...