Historical Women Detectives

When Indian Princess Alexandrina is left penniless by the sudden death of her father, the Maharaja of Brindor, Queen Victoria grants her a grace-and-favor home in Hampton Court Palace. Though rumored to be haunted, Alexandrina and her lady's maid, Pooki, have no choice but to take the Queen up on her offer. Aside from the ghost sightings, Hampton Court doesn't seem so bad. The princess is soon befriended by three eccentric widows who invite her to a picnic with all the palace's inhabitants, for which Pooki bakes a pigeon pie. But General-Major Bagshot dies after eating said pie....

The year is 1928, and after the death of a maid at a glamorous society party, fortune heir Bryan Guinness seizes life and proposes to 18-year-old Diana, the most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters. The maid's death is ruled an accident, and the newlyweds put it behind them to begin a whirlwind life. Accompanying Diana as her lady's maid is Louisa Cannon, as well as a coterie of friends, family and hangers on, from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh. When a second victim is found in Paris in 1931, Louisa begins to see links with the death of the maid two years previously.

Penrose & Pyke have until Christmas Eve to save the orphans’ home, by unravelling a tangle of tinsel and trickery. Private detective Charlie Pyke was looking forward to spending a quiet Christmas with his fiancée, Grace Penrose. Instead, Charlie and Grace must stop a dubious deal, find a sneak thief and foil a mischievous brother, with the help of a pair of inquisitive orphans and the spirit of a dear departed grandmother. If they can decipher the clues and make it through the dessert course, they just might survive their first family Christmas together. Tinsel and Trickery is a half-...

Penrose & Pyke are flung into an explosive new mystery during the campaign for women’s suffrage. Politicians are worried that women voters will oust them, liquor barons are terrified that women will favour prohibition, and the man in the street fears his wife will no longer be content with home and hearth. Just how far will they go to stop women from getting the vote? Medical student Grace Penrose and Detective Constable Charlie Pyke are about to find out. The ‘Penrose & Pyke Mysteries’ are a series of heart-warming, pulse-racing historical mysteries, set during a remarkable period of...

1920 - Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales: Tessa Wiggins's "madness" is provoked by the adopted spirit of a 2,000-year-old Druid priestess mentoring her to be the servant of The Earth Mother. When Tessa defies treatment, her lover asks a childhood friend, Sherlock Holmes, to intervene. But despite everyone's best intentions, Tessa finds herself in Hellingford Asylum, where she is driven toward her final breaking point on All-Halloween.

1937. War with Germany is dawning, and a civil war already raging in Spain. Split across political lines, the six Mitford sisters are more divided than ever. Meanwhile their former maid Louisa Cannon is now a private detective, working with her policeman husband Guy Sullivan.

*Introducing DCI Dani Bevan* Can an ordinary man really return from the dead...? On a stormy night in February 1943, the S.S Minerva was sunk by an enemy torpedo. Two men from the Scottish village of Dallanaich were travelling on the liner en-route to New York City. The Reverend Mackenzie Cowan and local schoolteacher Sandy Thomson were heading to a church conference due to be held there the following month. Thomson had left behind his young, pregnant wife. Both men were presumed drowned. Thirty years later, long-term Dallanaich resident Kenneth Garvie takes a trip to Toronto. As he walks ...

Penrose and Pyke’s wedding dream turns to ashes when the local women’s refuge goes up in flames. Grace Penrose is used to protesters at Lavender House, but she never expected them to set the refuge on fire, especially not on her wedding day. And her mother’s carefully orchestrated wedding plan definitely did not include Charlie Pyke disappearing into an inferno. The discovery of a woman’s body in the smouldering ruins rouses Grace and Charlie’s detective instincts. With marital bliss on their minds, an investigation is the last thing they need. But how can they ignore a murder, ...

Louise Lloyd is finally living the quiet life she’d longed for, working in a parfumerie by day and spending time with her new friends every night at the Aquarius club in Paris. When a desperate mother asks for help locating her artist daughter, Louise initially refuses to keep her hard-won but fragile peace intact. But the woman comes with a letter of introduction from an old friend in Harlem, and Louise realizes she has no choice but to do what she can to find the missing young woman.

Invitation to Magic: Cinderella and Prince Wicked He's Prince Wicked. She's clueless. Stephanie Plum jumps into the rabbit hole! FREE on Kindle Unlimited! Meet Countess Melanie de Fontaine. She’s not only nice and sweet, she happens to be a super-duper domestic goddess. While juggling house chores for her needy and demanding faux-mother and faux-sisters, she’s busy searching for her mother who’s been missing for years. Then again, sometimes, life can be overwhelming. When the invitation to the Royal Dance of the Year arrives, her faux-mother shoves it in her face, knowing full well ...

London, 1894. Albertine Honeycombe never wanted a husband and certainly not the one with fifteen children that her cousin, Aubrey, is trying to marry her off to. She reinvents herself as Countess Von Dagga, a private detective aiding the upper echelons of women in society. As the Countess, she is a married woman, with a conveniently absent husband who doesn’t exist, which allows her far more freedom than being single. When Lord Grendel, from whom she has recovered blackmail letters, is murdered, Albertine is suspect number one—having been the last person to see him.

Misty Dawn, a former Hollywood psychic to the stars, knows the dark and sometimes glamorous streets of Los Angeles are full of secrets, broken promises, and dashed hopes. When a young woman comes to her door because she’s lost her engagement ring and is afraid to tell her fiancé (the son of one of the world’s biggest cosmetics empires), Misty senses it’s no accident. Together Misty Dawn and her psychic charge, Wilson Thorne, must not only sneak behind the walls of the Conroy Estate (aka The House That Vanity Built), but go beyond the veil where the luminaries have laid plans to seek ...

After her bruising encounter with the law, Angela Marchmont has vowed to give up detecting and is doing her best to forget the events of last winter and the terrible lie she told to save herself. So, when a letter arrives from beyond the grave requesting her help and reminding her of the past, she is anything but pleased. Drawn reluctantly into one final case and spurred on by her guilty conscience, Angela soon discovers a viper's nest of family betrayals and hidden enmities that have lain undisturbed for years and that may have led to the deaths of more than one person.

Irene Adler, American opera singer and the one woman who outsmarted Sherlock Holmes, finds herself a widow at thirty-two, wealthy but emotionally broken. At the same time, Sherlock Holmes finds himself unable to return to England after faking his death at Reichenbach Falls and is drawn into an investigation of two men with designs on a woman they call Miss A, who is none other than Irene Adler herself. The Detective and The Woman throw their lot in together to uncover a dangerous plot with implications that stretch across the Atlantic. In the process, they meet legendary inventor Thomas Edison and experience life in Florida at the turn of the 20th century.

Sally Meredith's young life has been full of adventure. As a suffragist, she fought for women's right to vote. She drove an ambulance in France during the war. And she's already had a proposal and a broken engagement. But the past few years have been deadly dull, taking care of a cranky relative and now living alone in a quiet village. So when her eccentric uncle Fritzi arrives with the tale of his most recent invention - a deadly gas that nations are striving to get hold of - she's intrigued.

Plagued with guilt, Freda Simonson, the only witness to the murder of the landlord of Langcliffe's tavern, believes that her testimony may have convicted the wrong man, but when she passes, the case seems closed. It just so happens, though, that Freda's nephew is courting the renowned amateur sleuth Kate Shackleton, who has decided to holiday in Langcliffe with her teenage niece, Harriet.

Death Disease Dreadful work conditions A sequence of problems plagues Poppy Elgin, who arrives in England from Australia in the midst of the Spanish influenza outbreak. The Great War is over; her troubles are just starting. Will no one come to her aid? It's 1919 and women are cropping their hair, shortening their skirts, widening their horizons. Will Poppy ever really be an independent woman? Could a new friend be the solution? Petals & Pages is the heart-warming story of two friends whose valiant attempts at becoming independent women are thwarted at every step.

Now showing at the Palace: classic movies, ghostly mayhem, and murder! When Nora Paige agrees to use the Palace movie theater for the launch of a new online game, she has no way of knowing that the event will end in murder. But when one of the theater’s owners is accused of the crime, the future of the Palace could be in danger. With help from Trixie, the lively ghost of a 1930s usherette, Nora sets out to solve the crime, all while dealing with the latest manipulations from her lying ex, the meddling of a Hollywood mogul with revenge on his mind, and the mysterious delivery box of ...

New York, 1946. Lillian Pentecost is the most successful private detective in the city, but her health is failing. She hires an assistant to help with the investigative legwork. Willowjean Parker is a circus runaway. Quick-witted and street-smart, she's a jack-of-all-trades with a unique skill-set. When wealthy young widow Abigail Collins is murdered and the police are making no progress, Pentecost and Parker are hired by the family to track down the culprit.

Flavia Albia is a private investigator, always drawn to an intriguing puzzle - even if it is put to her by her new husband's hostile ex-wife. On the Quirinal Hill, Clodia Volumnia, a very young girl with stars in her eyes, has died, amid suggestions that she was poisoned by a love potion. It will have been supplied by a local witch, who goes by the name of Pandora, though Albia learns that Pandora carries on a trade in herbal beauty products while hiding much more dangerous connections.