Karen Charlton

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.

London, 1812: Treacherous gangs roam the capital, and not even the Palace of Westminster is safe....

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....

Northumberland, 1809: A beautiful young heiress disappears from her locked bedchamber at Linn Hagh. The local constables are baffled and the townsfolk cry "witchcraft"....

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....

A corpse rises from the dead in the morgue at Guy's Hospital, and his missing pantaloons appear to be cursed as they roam the city, causing consternation and death wherever they go. What possible connection can this have to a gang of female jewel thieves and a pot of raspberry jam?

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....

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....

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....