"Spring, 1897. London. Margaret Harkness, now in her early forties, must leave England for her health but lacks the funds. A letter arrives from her old friend Professor Bell, her old comrade in the hunt for Jack the Ripper and the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Homes. Bell invites her to join him in Germany on a mysterious mission for the German government involving the loss of state secrets to Anarchists. The resolution of this commission leads...

"It is 1851 and Mrs Rodd has received an unusual commission: wealthy businessman Jacob Welland is dying of consumption and implores our redoubtable detective to find his beloved brother, whom he has not seen for fifteen years. Joshua Welland was an Oxford scholar; brilliant, eccentric and desperately poor. Nobody can say exactly when he disappeared from his college, but he had taken to wandering the countryside and one day simply failed to return....

"From New York Times bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford comes the highly anticipated second book in the House of Falconer saga. James Lionel Falconer has risen quickly from a mere shop worker to being the right-hand man of Henry Malvern, head of the most prestigious shipping company in London. With Malvern's daughter Alexis running away to the country after a terrible tragedy and refusing to return, James' ascent to head of the company seems...

The first biography to give Mary Anne Lewis her due and to examine her singular marriage to Benjamin Disraeli When Mary Anne Lewis met Benjamin Disraeli, she was married to Wyndham Lewis, a rich, mildly successful politician at the center of nineteenth-century British high society. The three became friends and with his deep pockets Wyndham helped Disraeli-young, ambitious, and swimming in debt-get his start in the political arena. Mary Anne even...

In this companion biography to the acclaimed "Victoria", A.N. Wilson offers a deeply textured and ambitious portrait of Prince Albert, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the royal consort's birth. For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But...

Mary Quinn has a lot on her mind. James Easton, her longtime love interest, wants to marry her; but despite her feelings, independent-minded Mary hesitates. Meanwhile, the Agency has asked Mary to take on a dangerous case: convicted fraudster Henry Thorold is dying in prison, and Mary must watch for the return of his estranged wife, an accomplished criminal herself who has a potentially deadly grudge against James. Finally, a Chinese prizefighter...

The early life of Queen Victoria, from her ascension to the throne at the tender age of 18 to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert.

"American Midwest to Shanghai, from London to Tokyo, the 1850s was a decade of extraordinary change and upheaval: the world economy expanded fivefold; millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out lives in the wilderness; new technologies revolutionized how people communicated; and railways cut across great continents. Steam ships, telegraphs, photographs and pharmaceuticals all proliferated. In Heyday, an epic story of global...

Details the 1839 Opium War and the red tape, incompetence, and political cronyism that surrounded China's first conflict with the West and how these events fueled the foundation for modern Chinese nationalism.