Women Detectives

From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realize that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine.

May Day should mark the start of spring. But this year, it means murder... Fortunately antique store owner and amateur detective Bella Winter is on the case! Everyone in Hope Eaton climbs the hill to Sweet Agnes’ Spring on May Day, to greet the dawn and leave tokens among the flowers. Antique store owner Bella Winter grumbles about the early start, but she has to admit that watching the sun rise over the flower-strewn grove is worth it.

Late one night, a distraught young man knocks on the door of retired and recently widowed Ally Bright’s remote home on the Cornish coast. But before she can make sense of his confused words, he’s gone—not to be seen again until he’s found the next morning at the foot of the nearby cliffs.

Greetings from Monchac, Louisiana. Home to fifty-seven souls and the world's only floating stationery store! When Mila Breaux's LA dreams go up in smoke, she'll move her cozy lettering shop down to bayou country, and pile her pens and paper onto her late uncle's houseboat. But the discovery of human bones just feet from her new store will rock the foundations of the sleepy swamp town. It will be up to Mila and a quirky band of characters to get to the bottom of things before it is too late!

This unique collection for connoisseurs of detection done female style brings back six of the greatest fictional women sleuths of the era of gaslights and horseless carriages. Long out of print and unobtainable, these celebrated women 'tecs were once nearly as famous as the fictional sleuth of Baker Street himself. Their fame waned in the long decades of the 1930s through the '80s, when female sleuths took a backseat to Sam Spade, Nero Wolfe, and the like. But, they are back to baffle and thrill contemporary readers in The Legendary Women Detectives edited by Jean Marie Stine.

Texas genealogist Lucy Lancaster deals with murders in both the past and present in this captivating first mystery in the Ancestry Detective series.

Amongst the rows of charming, brightly painted cabins, an elderly man's beach hut is set on fire in the middle of the night—while he sleeps inside. By day, Fiona, Sue, and Daisy volunteer at the Dogs Need Nice Homes charity shop. By night, they investigate crimes. And they're determined to get to the bottom of this murder. Malcolm Crainey was an obsessive beach-comber who lovingly decorated his hut with the treasures he found by the sea. Who'd want to kill a harmless old man?

Retired actress Guinevere 'Gwinny' Tuffel is finding life hard after inheriting her late father's run-down house and discovering she's broke. But Gwinny is delighted to be at Hayburn Stead for her best friend Tina's wedding to a handsome Italian business magnate. However, before they get the chance to declare 'till death do us part', the husband-to-be is found dead in the library and Tina is accused of his murder. Convinced of her friend's innocence, Gwinny must uncover the real killer from a pool of larger-than-life suspects.

When friends Louise and Irina find a dead body in the local park whilst walking their dogs, they are soon drawn into the mystery of who murdered local entrepreneur Phil Creasey. Phil used to be a member of their dog walking community – nicknamed The Pack – until the death of his cockapoo, and The Pack feel they owe it to Phil to investigate his death. With Louise and Irina leading the charge, they soon come up against local drug dealers, stolen cars and a disturbing incident of poisoned dog biscuits.

The peace of a Midlands village is upset when local businessman Harry Bowers doesn’t return from choir practice. More concerned than the man’s own wife, it would seem, investigating officer Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy becomes convinced he has been done away with. But there is no trace of the man, just a litany of evidence of an ailing marriage and a nose-diving business venture. In charge of her first serious case, DS Roy will struggle to win the respect of her colleagues—in particular her Brummie boss, DCI Gavin Roscoe.

Gwinny Tuffel, the dog sitter, stays at an ageing rock singer's Little Venice houseboat to look after his border collie while he goes on tour. But during the annual Canal Carnival the singer's body is discovered, having never made it out of London. The police dismiss it as an accident, but Gwinny suspects murder most foul. It is up to her to solve this curious crime .

It's a stormy December morning when seal-watchers find the body on the beach at Winterton-on-Sea. His clothes have been torn to shreds on the rocks. The bright-orange life jacket didn't save him in the end. Detective Sara Hirst races to the scene. The washed-up body turns out to be a deckhand who got swept overboard in a storm.

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house, and unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood. When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over 20 years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match - to Morgan herself.

How do you stop a killer no one believes exists? DS Kat Ballantyne wants to know why a perfect girl like Rosie Duggan would jump to her death from a multistorey car park. Everyone is saying she took her own life. But Kat is unconvinced. Girls like Rosie—bright, popular, well adjusted, and with her whole life ahead of her—don’t fall from tall buildings. Unless someone pushes them.

The handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting PIs like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Laura Lippman, and many more.

Art teacher Walter Hartright is on the road to London when he encounters an enigmatic woman dressed entirely in white. She's an unnerving portent of strange things to come as Hartright starts a new job as drawing-master at Limmeridge House. There the teacher falls in love with Laura, his betrothed pupil, who bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white. Soon Walter is drawn into a family intrigue of greed, secrets, madness, and revenge.

On board the world’s finest luxury cruise ship, the days are filled with sunshine, cocktails, and incredible new places to explore. Unless you are employed as the ship’s detective, that is. That job falls to a lady called Patricia Fisher, a whip-smart sleuth whose special skills include attracting trouble, getting shot at, and running away screaming. So, when a mysterious stowaway is found murdered in the bowels of the ship, it falls firmly into her lap to work out not only who he is, but who killed him.

Island life suits Susan, and she can’t imagine ever moving from her beloved Isle of Wight. So it gives her real pleasure to see her young lodger Colette settle in to life by the sea, especially knowing that she has such a troubled past.

Beneath the surface lie deadly secrets... DI Shona Oliver agreed to move to Dumfries with her ex-banker husband when their teenage daughter got in with a bad crowd in London. As a Glasgow native, she's back on home turf. Living on the shores of the Solway Firth allows Shona to continue as an RNLI volunteer, and a call out to recover a woman's body indicates foul play. Police in Cumbria take the case but links back to Scotland keep Shona's team involved. As they investigate, reports of people trafficking and a spate of thefts from local shops compete for attention with a large scale drug bust.

Get hooked on Heck: the maverick detective who knows no boundaries. The perfect read for fans of Stuart Macbride and Luther. DS Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg is used to bloodbaths. But nothing can prepare him for this. Heck’s most dangerous case to date is open again. Two years ago, countless...