The party's over when murder makes an entrance...
Arya Winters is your typical cozy heroine. She lives in a cottage in a small English village, and bakes for a living--well, she specializes in macabre dessrts. She has the standard nosy neighbors, who she avoids ruthlessly due to her social anxiety. And, oh, she also has a mild case of Tourette's. When her neighbor Tobias Yards turns up dead, no one seems to connect it to Arya's Auntie Meera's recent death, so takes matters into her own hands. All she has to do to uncover the truth is to get over her aversion to Other People. Besides that, it's just a matter of getting beyond some yellow tape, dodging her former BFF Tallulah from secondary school, and getting into her new neighbor, writer Branwell Beam's, pants--he seems strangely reluctant. What Arya doesn't realize is that the murderer is dangerous, preying on lonely people who've experienced trauma, and that she might have to do all she can not to become the next victim.
Stoke Newington, 1863: Little Margaret Lovejoy is found brutally murdered in the outhouse at her family's estate.
A few days later, a man is cut down in a similar manner on the doorstep of courtesan and professional detective Heloise Chancey's prestigious address. At the same time, Heloise's maid, Amah Li Leen, must confront events from her past that appear to have erupted into the present day.
It s murder in the little English village, but the two local spinsters, Miss Campanula, the victim, and Miss Prentice, her friend who may have been the intended victim, are not exactly the beloved little old ladies of song and story. They were (and are) waspish, gossiping snobs, passionate only about their own narrowly defined religion .and, perhaps, about the local vicar. But could they have been sufficiently unpleasant to provoke a murderer?
In this exciting historical mystery debut set in Victorian England, a wealthy young widow encounters the pleasures—and scandalous pitfalls—of a London social season . . .
Frances Wynn, the American-born Countess of Harleigh, enjoys more freedom as a widow than she did as a wife. After an obligatory year spent mourning her philandering husband, Reggie, she puts aside her drab black gowns, leaving the countryside and her money-grubbing in-laws behind. With her young daughter in tow, Frances rents a home in Belgravia and prepares to welcome her sister, Lily, arriving from New York—for her first London season.
