Sapphire left an abusive home life in her small seaside town, looking for a better life in the big city. But straight away, she was off to a bad start. Things only got worse; within the first few months, she was interrogated by police on three separate occasions. Sapphire was finding it hard to hide all her secrets from the inspector that she had become so fond of. Things become heated up, and after six months of life in the city, Sapphire's journey takes her right back to where she started fromin a small country town, living with the same old abuse. Will she ever be able to escape that lifestyle? Is this forever? Will death be the only way out?

assie Pengear thought a job typing up inventory lists at a jewelry store would be fun. Until there was a kidnapping. And then a robbery. And then a murder. Now Cassie must figure out the connection between the events and hope it will lead her to the missing girl. approx. 68,000 words, print version 246 pages In a Victorian England that almost existed, a steampunk London where tinkerers and clockwork devices exist alongside hansom cabs and corsets, murder is still solved by traditional observation and intuition. This is the London where American typist Cassandra Pengear finds herself stumbling over corpses and helping Scotland Yard detectives solve murders (although they inexplicably prefer to call it interfering). Follow her adventures in the Cassie Pengear Mystery series, beginning with The Killing at the Carnival.

Early twentieth-century Singapore is a place where a person can disappear, and Harriet Gordon hopes to make a new life for herself there, leaving her tragic memories behind her--but murder gets in the way. Singapore, 1910--Desperate for a fresh start, Harriet Gordon finds herself living with her brother, a reverend and headmaster of a school for boys, in Singapore at the height of colonial rule. Hoping to gain some financial independence, she advertises her services as a personal secretary. It is unfortunate that she should discover her first client, Sir Oswald Newbold--explorer, mine magnate and president of the exclusive Explorers and Geographers Club--dead with a knife in his throat. When Inspector Robert Curran is put on the case, he realizes that he has an unusual witness in Harriet. Harriet's keen eye for detail and strong sense of duty interests him, as does her distrust of the police and her traumatic past, which she is at pains to keep secret from the gossips of Singapore society. When another body is dragged from the canal, Harriet feels compelled to help with the case. She and Curran are soon drawn into a murderous web of treachery and deceit and find themselves face-to-face with a ruthless cabal that has no qualms about killing again to protect its secrets.

It’s late Autumn, 1950. Robert Lynnford, star crime-reporter for The London Herald, is alerted to the theft of an extremely valuable exhibit from the Queen’s Fine Art Museum in London - the Elephant’s Sapphire, a much-coveted historic heirloom from Nepal which has been held by the museum since the 1880s.