Victorian Suspense

Young Imogen Burnhope and her maid Rhoda board a non-stop train to Oxford to visit her Aunt Cassandra, who waits on the platform at Oxford station where the train terminates, to greet them. Only they never arrive. All the passengers alight but the two women are nowhere to be seen. The train is searched and the coachman swears he saw them board onto first class, but they seem to have vanished into thin air. The Railway Detective must unravel the mystifying web of their disappearance before Imogen and Rhoda vanish into oblivion for good.

When Muriel Carew attends a lavish society party, the last person she expects to bump into is her ex-fiancee Henry Jekyll, a man she's not seen for many years. When Jekyll turns out to be investigating a series of missing persons in London, Muriel is intrigued. But Jekyll is not working alone, and if Muriel wants to aid in the investigation, she must work with both Henry and his partner, the monstrous and uncouth Mr Hyde.

1876, Victorian London. Minnie Ward, the feisty scriptwriter for the Variety Palace Music Hall, is devastated when her best friend is found brutally murdered. She enlists the help of private detective Albert Easterbrook to help her find justice, even though he already has his hands full trying to catch the notorious Hairpin Killer. Together they navigate London, from its high-class clubs to its murky underbelly. But as the bodies pile up, Albert's burgeoning feelings for his amateur partner start to interfere.

Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await the arrival of Dickens’s unfinished novel. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that he hopes will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.

Matilda Hayward is determined to have a career. After all, it is 1888! While reporting for the Women’s Journal newspaper, Matilda is sent to cover the visiting Freak Show and interview Mrs Anna Tufton, a giantess. During the interview, the giantess slips a note to Matilda begging for her help to escape the show she is forced to do by her husband. But when the giantess’s husband is found murdered, the giantess is a likely suspect.

When the Earl of Rancliffe suffers humiliation at the hands of the mysterious Mademoiselle Noire, he vows revenge. But his anger soon becomes obsession, as she leads him into ever more dangerous games. As cruel as she is beautiful, Mademoiselle Noire has no intention of revealing her true identity, nor of entangling her heart.

The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Philippa is on the shelf at twenty-three. That is until she hears her father talking with one of his elderly friends about her marriage. They mentioned the word Sterling, and she thinks her father is trying to sell her into marriage. It’s amazing to her that one little misunderstanding can set her on the path to true love. Sterling Brightwell has just finished serving in the military. When his uncle suggests his marriage to Philippa, he realizes it’s probably a good idea. But when he meets her he finds out she is a woman with her own mind. He is not ...

The Bloodline War has begun and blood will soon flow across Europe. Juniper St. James has one goal: escape to England. A horde of vampires stand in her way including the one who has captured her heart. The future teeters on a knife's edge as the crimson tide of destiny threatens to engulf her. To guide her, she has three gifts from an alchemist, two brave bards, and a prophecy of the future. Can she flee with her life or will she become one of the undead?

Isobel Amsel is wasting away in an asylum. Mad with boredom, she recklessly risks her future wandering the countryside. When an excursion nearly turns deadly, Isobel fears one of her enemies is targeting her, but she quickly discovers something far more insidious. The lives of two boys are at stake, and she desperately wishes her partner were by her side.

1865. A passenger train stands in York station. Jack Follis, the guard, patrols the platform to make sure that everyone is safely aboard. Returning to the brake van to load a box into it, he is alarmed by a smell of burning. Before he can find the cause, there is an explosion and the van is engulfed in flames. Responding to summons from the North-Eastern Railway, Robert Colbeck and Victor Leeming are sent to investigate. The two are split on whether a murder has taken place. Although the information they received was scant, Colbeck is convinced this is a murder case.

This sequel to Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera begins just after Christine and Raoul leave the Phantom in his lair in the basement of the Opera House. After faking his own death to escape the Paris authorities, the Phantom sets out to find Christine again, eventually following her and Raoul to London. When a crazed maniac begins his killing spree not far from Christine's home, her life maybe in danger... In the ultimate test, will the Phantom put his life and his freedom at risk for his love?

Iain Sinclair, Marquis of Alynwick, is certain there is a special hell for him. An unrepentant rake, he holds nothing sacred - except for beautiful Elizabeth York. For years, Alynwick has tried to forget the woman he loved so well, and treated so badly. A woman who could hold nothing in her heart for him but hatred. All of society believes Elizabeth, the blind daughter of a duke, to be a proper young lady. But no one knows of her wanton affair with Alynwick.

London's most notorious scoundrel has been saddled with an abandoned baby boy, and with the unflappable, intriguing spinster summoned to nurse him. Justine Brightmore may be a viscount's niece, but she's also a spy's daughter, determined to safeguard the infant when his suspected royal parentage makes him a target. Yet how to protect herself from the rakish Griffin? Marriage might shield her reputation, but it can only imperil her heart, especially with a groom intent on delicious seduction.

In this novella, Annie and Nate Dawson, the amateur sleuths from M. Louisa Locke's cozy Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, are visiting Nate's family at their ranch near San Jose, California. What was supposed to be a pleasant romantic interlude for the two of them, plus a chance for Annie to get to know Nate's family better, turns serious when a crime is uncovered. And, as in Locke's short stories from this series, Annie gets help in resolving the crisis from a very unexpected quarter.

Nineteen-year-old Carrie Dobbs has a secret; when her parents discover what she has desperately tried to hide, Carrie's mother, Florrie takes matters into her own hands and arranges a marriage with Arnold Bateman to get Carrie out of Whitechapel and away from the gossips. He is a man Carrie could never love, the opposite of Johan, the young man she adores. Arnold has been posted to India and expects her to go with him and be the wife he needs to further his promotion and position in the army.

In Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth full-length book in the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Locke explores life in University of California, Berkeley campus, in 1881. Laura and her friends face the remarkably modern problems of fraternity hazings, fraught romantic relationships, and fractious faculty politics.

On a freezing Christmas Eve in 1879, a forensic psychic reader is summoned from her Baker Street lodgings to the scene of a questionable death. Alexandrina Victoria Pendlebury (named after her godmother, the current queen of England) is adamant that the death in question is a magically compromised murder and not a suicide, as the police had assumed. After the shocking revelation contained by the body in question, Alex must put her personal loss aside to uncover the deeper issues at stake, before more bodies turn up.

5 - Star Review on Amazon and Goodreads! "This is one of best stories I have read in a long time. There were many twists and turns and I had a hard time putting down this book. I highly recommend this book." "Stephanie Patterson is a terrific writer, I've read every one of her books and all are excellent! " Scandalous behavior has made Caelan Hennesy's family an object of derision in polite society. Caelan, Cal to his friends, needs a bride with impeccable breeding, a modest demeanor and one who is completely scandal-free. At twenty-four, he meets the young woman of his dreams in a Paris ...

Life in 1881 San Francisco is difficult if you are a poor widow like Mrs. O’Malley, especially when you have seven children and are forced to live in one of the crowded neighborhoods South of Market. Late one night, as she sat at the window of her crowded flat, sewing and worrying, she noticed something strange going on across the street. Her decision to investigate will have unexpected consequences.

The flat-cart rattled and bumped along the dirt road, the donkey moving at a sedate walk, in as little hurry as myself, apparently, to come to Innismore. I sat huddled on the boards, hands clasped and eyes roving the marshlands and bogs on either side of me, wondering what had possessed me to leave Dublin and come west into Connemara, this wild and rocky country that seemed as inhospitable as an Englishman’s musket. Seamus McCarty, he of the black scowl and the curious gray eyes, who drove the flat-cart and glanced at me from time to time with a quirking of his bushy eyebrows, was almost ...