Elsie Jones, John "Jack" Young, Mary Moore and George McDougal all live in service to a secret: Scotland Yard's best source of clues and leads is actually one of London's oldest coffee houses. These four young people manage the house as waitress, clerk, manager and owner-but they moonlight as England's finest undercover detectives.Therefore, when a priceless portrait from a traveling Da Vinci collection goes missing, they are the first on the job. Using their unusual set of sleuthing skills, and with the unknowing help of their tale-telling customers, they must track down the thief before he makes off with another great work, without betraying their true identities to the patrons of the Oxford Street Coffee House.

Two young women and one young man lead unobtrusive lives working at a Victorian coffee house, for the owner Mr. McDougal. But when a famous painting is stolen, they must assume their other identities--for they moonlight as apprentice detectives under the employ of Mycroft Holmes.

How could a painting be stolen from a museum without a single door or window being broken? Two young women and one young man lead unobtrusive lives working at a Victorian coffee house, for the owner Mr. McDougal. But when a famous painting is stolen, they must assume their other identities: moonlighting as apprentice detectives under the employ of Mycroft Holmes. But will this case strain the limits of their friendship and their wits? "The Case of the Young Patrician Lady" is a lighthearted mystery from the pen of Alydia Rackham. If you enjoy the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, you will love this little jaunt into Victorian London.

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.