Showing results by author "Karen Charlton" in All Categories

Northamptonshire, 1810: As a new canal network snakes across the landscape, a vicious mob stakes its claim to the county. Every local constable is out on the hunt for the ruthless Panther Gang. When an elderly man is robbed and murdered in sleepy Middleton, the beleaguered magistrates send for help from London's Bow Street Police Office.

Cambridgeshire, September 1813: Detective Stephen Lavender and Constable Ned Woods are lured to an isolated estate in the deadly marshland surrounding Ely, to investigate a murder.

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.

There's a new man in charge at Bow Street Magistrates' Court and all is not well. His ambition is to split up Lavender and Woods—and to add to Lavender's woes, someone is leaking exaggerated stories about his investigations to The Times. Lavender is tasked with solving the theft of an aristocrat's precious jewels, while Woods is instructed to track down a libeler. But after a series of vicious murders and surprising coincidences, they discover that these apparently unconnected crimes have more in common than they could ever have imagined. 

When her husband goes "missing in action", Jemma James returns to the city of her birth to set up a private detective agency with her best friend, Roberta "Bobbie" Baker, with whom she shares a passionate love of Golden Age crime fiction. These two enterprising young women soon find themselves embroiled in a series of mysterious cases, shadowing blackmailers and bigamists, and investigating the perplexing history of a wealthy young woman who seems determined to wipe out her past. And it's not long before they stumble across an unsolved murder.

London, 1812: Treacherous gangs roam the capital, and not even the Palace of Westminster is safe. When Detective Stephen Lavender is called in to investigate a highway robbery and a cold-blooded murder, both the cases take a dangerous and disturbing personal twist.

Northumberland, 1809: A beautiful young heiress disappears from her locked bedchamber at Linn Hagh. The local constables are baffled and the townsfolk cry "witchcraft". The heiress' uncle summons help from Detective Lavender and his assistant, Constable Woods, who face one of their most challenging cases.

While Jemma continues to search for her missing husband, the citizens of historic York are shocked by a series of vicious crimes at the city's two museums. A bungled break-in at the Yorkshire Museum is quickly followed by the brutal murder of Lance Richards, a sub-curator at the neighboring Castle Museum. The main suspect is Anthony Gill, a quiet and unprepossessing clerk. But Gill doesn't have an alibi and is uncooperative with the police. His desperate lawyer hires Jemma and Bobbie from Smoke & Cracked Mirrors to prove his innocence.

On a cold February night in Regency London, a dark curtain falls on the Sans Pareil Theatre following the death of April Clare, a promising young actress, whose body is found in mysterious circumstances. Detective Stephen Lavender and his dependable deputy, Constable Woods, quickly discover that nothing is quite as it seems. As successive mysteries unfold, they soon realise that it is not only the actors from the Sans Pareil who are playing a part.

Detective Stephen Lavender's wife and children are spending a glorious summer in the picturesque village of Ealing. When the vicar's wife is poisoned, Lavender is asked to review the case. He soon realizes something rotten is festering at the heart of this rural idyll. Convinced the wrong man has been arrested and the killer is still at large, Lavender is also disturbed to discover someone is sending the local gentry vile letters containing outrageous accusations. Could the same hand that drips such poison from their quill also have administered that fatal dose of arsenic?