Curfew was a strange book to write. When I told people what I was working on—that I was writing a novel about a near-future Britain in which all men are electronically tagged and not allowed out after 7 P.M.—women would laugh, and men would turn pale and ask me if I was serious. Like so…
A few years ago I bumped into the new Master of my old Oxford College (Oxford University is made up of 39 self-governing Colleges). He kindly offered to give me a tour of his home as I’d been developing a new novel set in an Oxford College, and I leaped at the chance to look…
Socialite-turned-amateur detective Amory Ames is about to turn into something else: a mother. Nearing the end of her pregnancy, Amory has left the glitz and glamour of 1930’s London for the peace and quiet of Thornecrest, her husband Milo’s country house in Kent. There, her days are filled with planning the Springtide Festival, the annual…
I’m pretty sure Anna Downes’ The Safe Place will be this summer’s quintessential beach read. An intelligent page-turner featuring beautiful, flawed people in glamorous surroundings with a ripped from the headlines twist, this is the perfect novel for those on a getaway or, given the interesting times we live in, those longing for a getaway.…
Lady Cecilia Bates of Danby Hall is a delightful heroine, level-headed, curious, persistent, and kind. Cecilia had a taste of being of service, someone of value, when she solved a murder in her own home but that was months ago. After the excitement at Danby last spring, investigating a terrible murder in her own dining…
Prologue When the car bypassed the main terminal building and pulled up next to a sign that said PRIVATE JET CENTER, Emily breathed in so fast she almost choked. “You’re kidding me,” she said to her driver (her very own driver!), who smiled and opened the door for her like she was Cinderella. A security…
Join author Cindy Anstey as she explores how the concept of a full-time police force evolved from the informal truncheon-swinging “Peelers” and “Bobbies.” The Hummingbird Dagger—Cindy’s new YA novel set in a turbulent 1800’s London as the police force is transforming—blends romance, danger, and mystery. Research is the lifeblood of a historical writer. Not only…
In Carolyn Kirby’s debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns, Cora’s buried past begins to unearth itself, and Cora must find out where we first learn violence: from our scars or from our hearts. Victorian England is a terrible place for an impoverished woman. Cora Burns knows this firsthand. Born to a mother she knows only…
Part history, part mystery, Nicola Cornick’s The Woman in the Lake features a beautiful, golden gown with a deadly secret and a dark past—one that threatens to possess the troubled Fen and destroy her sanity. Nicola Cornick is known for her fluid time-slip plots, which blur boundaries of time and space. The Woman in the Lake is…
In Emma Rous’ debut novel The Au Pair, Seraphine Mayes discovers a troubling photograph her family’s Norfolk estate while attending her father’s funeral. She tracks down the family’s au pair to further investigate, and a decades-old family secret begins to unravel. A family mourns the sudden death of their father. Seraphine Mayes, her twin brother Danny,…
