York Detective Ladies' Agency Mysteries

York, England: 1940 "An unsuitable job for a woman . . . " 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. But the dead don't stay dead for long in historic York. As the "phoney war" draws to a close, and the sky above the soaring twin towers of the twelfth century Minster darkens with menace, Jemma learns that even she is not above suspicion in wartime Britain.

York, England: June 1940 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. Meanwhile, the two women are led a merry dance by Jodie, a famous and spirited actress, whose aristocrat husband wants evidence for a divorce. As the nation waits nervously to hear the fate of their sons and brothers trapped at Dunkirk, a twisting series of events whisk Jemma and Bobbie through the glamourous world of the starlet, down corridors of dusty fossils, and into terrifying danger. Vengeful passions and a dark crime lie beneath the civilized veneer of those elders who preserve our history. But if Anthony Gill didn't murder Lance Richards, who did-and why?