The horrifying rape and apparent suicide of Catherine Quixwood, wife of a wealthy merchant, falls outside the new jurisdiction of Special Branch head Thomas Pitt, but so pervasively offensive are the rumors about the victim that Pitt quietly takes a hand in the investigation. Yet even with the help of his ingenious wife, Charlotte, and his former superior, Victor Narraway, Pitt is stumped. Why did high-minded, cultured Catherine choose not to accompany...

Thomas Pitt is the powerful head of Britain's Special Branch, and some people fear that he may have been promoted beyond his abilities. He, too, has moments of self-doubt, especially as rumors reach him of a plot to blow up connections on the Dover-London rail line, - on which Austrian duke Alois Habsburg is soon to travel to visit his royal English kin. Why would anyone destroy an entire train to kill one person, or are the rumors designed to distract...

Special Branch officer Thomas Pitt, hastening to rendezvous with a secret informant, arrives a second too late, preceded by a knife-wielding assassin. As he pursues the killer and the information he needs to stop a devastating plot against the British government, his clever wife Charlotte heads to Dublin to investigate a case involving Pitt's supervisor, Victor Narraway.

When Charlotte learns of her mother's distress in losing a locket with a compromising picture, she has no idea that it's just the beginning of a series of bizarre events that will end in sudden death.

In 1925, the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, her husband, Alec Fletcher (a Scotland Yard Detective) and their new twin infant children inherit and move to a new, larger house on the outskirts of London proper, in a stage of slight disrepair (thanks to an aged, now deceased, uncle). Set in a small circle of houses and a communal garden, it seems a near idyllic setting. That is until a dead body turns up half-hidden under the bushes of the communal...

Inspector Thomas Pitt learns that a boy, clearly from the upper classes, has been found in the filthy sewers of Bluegate Fields, one of London's most dangerous slums. And the boy had been violated before he was murdered. The boy's family refuses to answer the police's questions, and the inspector begins to wonder what secrets they are trying to hide.

Legendary science fiction author Fowler Faulkes may be dead, but his creation, the iconic Dr. Derringer, lives on in popular culture. Or, at least, the character would live on if not for Faulkes's predatory and greedy heir Hilary, who, during his time as the inflexible guardian of the estate, has created countless enemies in the relatively small community of writers of the genre. So when he is stabbed nearly to death in a room with only one door,...