all your Reads in Here

When most of us see the subtitle to Bradley Harper's debut mystery, A Knife in the Fog , we'll have a question. Who is Margaret Harkness? The subtitle is "A Mystery Featuring Margaret Harkness & Arthur Conan Doyle". Margaret Harkness was a journalist and author in the late 1800s who published under the name John Law. And, she, like the other main characters in this compelling story, was a real person. Dr. Arthur Doyle is a young practicing physician in 1888. He's published one story featuring a detective called Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet", but he is so disillusioned by the small payment he received that he vows never to write another crime story. Instead, he's working on a historical novel. He's stunned to receive a summons from former Prime Minister William Gladstone. Will Doyle come to London and meet with Gladstone's secretary to learn of an unusual proposal? Intrigued, the young doctor takes the train to discover why Gladsto...

Heather Redmond launches a new mystery series with Charles Dickens as the amateur sleuth. Dickens, who is working as a journalist, with his eye on a writing career, is a fascinating character in  A Tale of Two Murders. It appears that the series will be called "A Dickens of a Crime". Dickens is at dinner with the Hogarths, his editor's family, when they hear women screaming. Dickens, Hogarth, and the eldest Hogarth daughter, Kate, rush next door where a widow lives alone with her two children. They find Christiana Lugoson so sick that Dickens carries her to her room, and he and Kate tend the ailing young woman. But, Christiana dies within twenty-four hours. The death of a seventeen-year-old bothers Dickens, but he has no proof that something was wrong about the scene. It's only when another journalist mentions a similar death exactly a year earlier that Dickens suspects murder. With his editor's permission, he makes inquiries. He and Kate spend a lot of time toget...