Cozy Regency Mystery

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.

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Twelve sweet Regency Christmas romance stories to make you fall in love this holiday season. Christmas Mystery of the Heart Escaping her past, Lady Sarah Sayers seeks a simple life as a governess. Her world is turned upside down when she meets the Duke of Huntington. Together, they must solve a mystery, but will they also find love in this troubled time? A Duke for Christmas Isabella did not want to end up on Charles’ doorstep, but it might be exactly what both of them need… A clean, Regency romance to warm your heart Christmas Masquerade Ball A Christmas tale of mystery and love from ...

I am the narrator of this book. I have already carried every footstep, every whispered aside, every inconvenient corpse, and now they have decided I should also persuade you to read it. This is what happens when one proves reliable. What I carried was a cozy Regency murder with a ghost who refuses to mind his own death. Bath’s Assembly Rooms are polished, candlelit, and brimming with manners, until the dancing master collapses mid-figure and immediately reappears floating above his own body, deeply offended and tethered to Miss Adelaide Finchwick, a woman whose greatest social crime is ...

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 there is one thing Verity Lark finds more unsettling than having to give a shooting lesson to the woman whom she has ridiculed in print for months, it is having to give the lesson on the very same morning her alter ego Mr. Twaddle-Thum publishes an apology for erroneously reporting a key detail of one of her favorite subject’s early murder investigations.

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 ...

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 ...

An inherited estate. A hostile steward. A corpse in the forest—and a past that refuses to stay buried. Newly married and eager to begin their life together, Zoe and Quinton Coleville arrive at Cedarbrook, Quinton’s ancestral estate. But the welcome is anything but warm. Two days later, a body is found near the crumbling shell of the old manor house hidden deep in the woods. A shadowy figure seen in the West Wood only fuels the local legend of a Coleville ghost watching the estate, protecting its secrets, unable to rest. With their friends on the way to visit—and quickly drawn into the...

The third book in the Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery series, which finds the amateur sleuths facing their most daunting challenge yet: preventing the murder of the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Someone is trying to kill Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Esteemed aunt of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy...

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 ...

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 ...

Twenty-six-year-old Beatrice Hyde-Clare is far too shy to investigate the suspicious death of a fellow guest in the Lake District. A spinster who lives on the sufferance of her relatives, she would certainly not presume to search the rooms of her host's son and his friend looking for evidence. Reared in the twin virtues of deference and docility, she would absolutely never think to question the imperious Duke of Kesgrave about anything, let alone how he chose to represent the incident to the local constable. And yet that's exactly what she does.

This sparkling box set includes all four full-length novels in Claudia Stone’s Regency Murder and Marriage series—a delightful blend of cosy mystery, romantic mischief, and sharp-tongued heroines who always find trouble… and often find love along the way.

A marquess and a lady must avoid rumors and scandal while solving a great mystery. Lady Prudence has always enjoyed London. However, when her cousin suddenly appears, frantically handing her a package before being knocked to the ground by a runaway carriage, everything changes in an instant. A gentleman nearby comes to her aid, and instantly, Prudence finds herself locked in a dangerous mystery. Felix, the Marquess of Stoneleigh, had been intending to leave London, finding his search for a bride to be less than successful. None of the young ladies have truly caught his attention, no matter ...

In the second installment of the Q&Z Regency Mystery series, Quinton and Zoe must take on their most complex and chilling case yet. When the savage murder of a dressmaker bears a striking resemblance to a series of murders spanning two decades—including Quinton’s own mother—Zoe Demas and Quinton Huxley join forces again to unmask the killer. As the two of them draw closer to the truth, as well as each other, things take a dark turn when one of their friends is arrested for the present killing. Now they, alongside the diverse cast of characters they’ve come to rely on, must race ...