Historical Mystery

Susan Elia MacNeal – Mr Churchill's Secretary (Maggie Hope #1) is our british crime book of the month for February. Maggie Hope, a young American in London during the second world war, finds herself being drawn into a secretive world of spies, code-breaking and betrayal.

Ann Granger – The Testimony of the Hanged Man is our british crime book of the month for January. Victorian London is brought vividly to life in Ann Granger's fifth historical crime novel to feature Scotland Yard's Inspector Ben Ross and his wife Lizzie. A hanged man would say anything to save his life. But what if his testimony is true? When Inspector Ben Ross is called to Newgate Prison by a man condemned to die by the hangman's noose he isn't expecting to give any credence to the man's testimony. But the account of a murder he witnessed over seventeen years ago is so utterly believeable that Ben can't help wondering if what he's heard is true.

Antonia Hodgson – The Devil in the Marshalsea is our book of the month for September. London, 1727 - and Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels and coffee-houses into the hell of a debtors' prison. The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor and disease. And those who try to escape will suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of the gaol's rutheless governor and his cronies. A twisting mystery, a dazzling evocation of early 18th Century London.

Alex Grecian – The Yard is our book of the month for August. 1890, London.  Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror is finally over, but a new one is just beginning…

Andrew Martin – Night Train to Jamalpur is our book of the month for June. India, 1923. On the broiling Night Mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target?