Historical Traditional Detectives

It's Christmas, 1866, and amateur sleuth Charles Lenox, recently engaged to his best friend, Lady Jane Grey, is happily celebrating the holiday in his Mayfair townhouse. Across London, however, two journalists have just met with violent deaths - one shot, one throttled. Lenox soon involves himself in the strange case but must leave it behind to go north to Stirrington, where he is running for Parliament. Once there, he gets a further shock when Lady Jane sends him a letter whose contents may threaten their nuptials. In London, the police apprehend two unlikely and unrelated murder suspects.

Spanning events over thirty years, Volume I of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes relates narratives of Holmes and Watson's days in Baker Street, as well as particulars of Holmes's supposed retirement. Follow along as The Master and his Boswell travel from the streets of London to the Kent countryside, to Oxford and Sussex. Written in traditional canonical style, these stories provide fresh details of Holmes's world. Join us as we climb the seventeen steps to the Baker Street sitting room, where Holmes and Watson prepare to begin their next adventure. The game is afoot!

The 13th installment in Stephanie Barron's fan favorite Being a Jane Austen Mystery series. Between novels, Victorian England's most beloved author doubles as a sleuth in often idyllic locales. November 1815. The Battle of Waterloo has left the British economy in shreds; Henry Austen, Jane's favorite brother, is about to declare bankruptcy. The crisis destroys Henry's health, and Jane flies to his London bedside.

Six people sit down to a sumptuous meal at a table laid for seven. In front of the empty place is a sprig of rosemary - "rosemary for remembrance." A strange sentiment considering no one is likely to forget the night, exactly a year ago, that Rosemary Barton died at exactly the same table, her beautiful face unrecognizable, convulsed with pain and horror. But then Rosemary had always been memorable - she had the ability to arouse strong passions in most people she met. In one case, strong enough to kill....

With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work.

Lady Katherine would rather chase clues than suitors. Her reputation as a matchmaker could give her the cover she needs to follow in her detective father's footsteps. If she catches the Pink Ribbon Killer before he strikes again, she'll win her dowry and her independence in the process. One look through the exclusive Northbrooke estate house party doubles her suspect list. With the help of her trusty maid and her precocious pug, Katherine risks it all to unmask the killer. But is winning her freedom worth putting another debutante in mortal danger?

The Great War is still raging when Francesca Hatton’s adored grandfather dies on his estate in England’s isolated Exe Valley. She is his sole heir, for her five cousins are dead now on the battlefields of France. Among his effects, Francesca is stunned to find a letter cursing the Hattons. And at the funeral, a stranger publicly accuses Hatton of murder. Who was her grandfather? The kind man who raised her - or a secretive killer? For in the back garden where she and her cousins once played, there is a white stone they always called the Murder Stone

In pre-war London, Olivia Denis wins a plum assignment from her newspaper when she meets the glamorous French fashion designer, Mimi Mareau. Mimi has it all - wealth, talent, acclaim, and a British duke for a lover. But on her first visit to Mimi's new Mayfair house of haute couture, Olivia finds something else - the body of an unknown man. Mimi and her three French assistants say they don't know the man, but is that true? As Olivia spends time around the salon, she learns at least one of the women knew the dead man and all four women are lying.

September 1940. As the Blitz takes its nightly toll on London and Hitler prepares his invasion fleet just across the Channel in occupied France, Britain is full of talk about enemy agents. Suspicion is at an all-time high, and no one is sure who can be trusted. In Canning Town, rescue workers are unsettled when they return to a damaged street and discover a body that shouldn’t be there. When closer examination of the corpse reveals death by strangling, Detective Inspector John Jago is called upon to investigate.

London, 1890. 221B Baker St. A fine-art dealer named Edmund Carstairs visits Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson to beg for their help. He is being menaced by a strange man in a flat cap - a wanted criminal who seems to have followed him all the way from America. In the days that follow, his home is robbed, his family is threatened. And then the first murder takes place.

London, 1815. Amateur sleuth Atlas Catesby is about to discover the dark side of the bright lights. His long-awaited night at the opera with Lady Lilliana ends abruptly when a notorious courtesan is shot to death in Covent Garden. The infamous victim was the mistress of the powerful Marquess of Vessey. Atlas believes that the marquess - his former brother in law - is responsible for the long-ago death of Atlas' sister, Phoebe. Atlas seizes the opportunity to potentially avenge his sister's death.

December 1941. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill arrives in Washington, D.C., along with special agent Maggie Hope. Posing as his typist, she is accompanying the prime minister as he meets with President Roosevelt to negotiate the United States’ entry into World War II. When one of the First Lady’s aides is mysteriously murdered, Maggie is quickly drawn into Mrs. Roosevelt’s inner circle—as ER herself is implicated in the crime.

In the latest mystery in the New York Times best-selling series, Maisie Dobbs must unravel a case of wartime love and death—an investigation that leads her to a long-hidden affair between a young cartographer and a mysterious nurse..... August 1914. Michael Clifton is mapping the land he has just purchased in California’s beautiful Santa Ynez Valley, certain that oil lies beneath its surface. But as the young cartographer prepares to return home to Boston, war is declared in Europe,,,,

In Nicholas Meyer's The Return of the Pharaoh, Sherlock Holmes returns in an adventure that takes him to Egypt in search of a missing nobleman, a previously undiscovered pharaoh's tomb, and a conspiracy that threatens his very life.

London, 1945. The capital is shrouded in the darkness of the blackout, and mystery abounds in the parks after dusk. During a stroll through Regent's Park, Bruce Mallaig witnesses two men acting suspiciously around a footbridge. In a matter of moments, one of them has been murdered; Mallaig's view of the assailant but a brief glimpse of a ghastly face in the glow of a struck match. The murderer's noiseless approach and escape seems to defy all logic, and even the victim's identity is quickly thrown into uncertainty.

Like most women, Elizabeth Miles assumes many roles; unlike most, hers have made her a woman on the run. Living on the edge of society, Elizabeth uses her guile to relieve so-called respectable men of their ill-gotten gains. But brutal and greedy entrepreneur Oscar Thornton is out for blood. He's lost a great deal of money and is not going to forgive a woman for outwitting him. With his thugs hot on her trail, Elizabeth seizes the moment to blend in with a group of women who have an agenda of their own.

In the middle of the abbey's evening services, an angry mob pursues a young boy into the sacred peace of the sanctuary. Terrified and in tatters, he clutches at the altar-cloth, grasping for mercy in the only sure place he might find it. He is accused of robbery and murder, but Cadfael senses his innocence and sets out to prove it.

London, 1812. At a fashionable address in leafy Mayfair, a far cry from Detective Stephen Lavender’s usual haunts, a man is found dead in his room. He has been brutally stabbed, but the door is locked from the inside, and the weapon is missing. The deceased is David MacAdam, an Essex businessman with expensive tastes. As Lavender and Constable Ned Woods travel between London and Chelmsford seeking to understand MacAdam’s final hours and unearth the grisly truth, they uncover a tangled web of deceit behind his stylish facade.

When Lady Althea accompanies her sister-in-law, Jane, to a house party at Ranleigh, she hopes it will be a welcome return to peace and tranquility. Long walks and lazy days are the things Althea needs to advance her scientific studies and to decide whether or not to give up her freedom and marry the handsome and enigmatic Duke of Norwich. However, when she finds the body of a guest in the ornamental pond, she is thrown into yet another mystery. In her search for the truth, she must unmask Napoleonic spies, dig up long buried secrets, and forge new breakthroughs in forensic science.

In The Limehouse Text, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn discover a pawn ticket among the effects of Barker's late assistant, leading them to London's Chinese district, Limehouse. There they retrieve an innocent-looking book that proves to be a rare and secret text stolen from a Nanking monastery, containing lethal martial arts techniques forbidden in the West.