Ashley Gardner
A Bow Street Runner summons Captain Gabriel Lacey to a Berkeley Square ballroom where a young dandy has been found stabbed to death during a society ball. The prime suspect: Lacey's former commander, Colonel Brandon.
Instead of denying the charges, Colonel Brandon allows himself to be arrested, and claims, to Lacey's shock, that the lady he'd stayed protectively near at the ball is his mistress. Lacey realizes that he is the only person not
...September 1817
Captain Gabriel Lacey travels with Lady Breckenridge to his boyhood home in northern Norfolk only to discover mysterious happenings in and around the Lacey estate. A young woman, cousin of an old friend, has gone missing, strange objects appear in Lacey's ruined house, and the dark windmills on the marshes keep pulling Lacey to them.
The underworld criminal, James Denis, uses Lacey's visit to Norfolk as an opportunity
...Winter 1818: As Captain Gabriel Lacey prepares for his upcoming wedding, his former neighbor, Marianne Simmons, asks for his help to find an actress friend who's gone missing. Lacey agrees to help look for the actress, little realizing that the search will pit him against men who think nothing of abduction, assault, or sending incendiary devices to the innocent.
At the same time, Lacey's personal life is changing, and his time for
...June 1817
Captain Lacey stops to assist a young woman in the market at Covent Garden one morning, and realizes to his astonishment that she is his daughter, Gabriella. Lacey then discovers that his estranged wife and her paramour, a French officer, have journeyed to London at the invitation of James Denis to dissolve her marriage to Captain Lacey.
Meanwhile, a Bow Street Runner and a man from the Thames River Police have asked Lacey to help
...On a cold January night in 1817, former cavalry officer Captain Gabriel Lacey is summoned to the banks of the Thames to identify the body of a young woman. When Lacey looks down at the pretty, dead young woman, cut down too soon, he vows to find her murderer.
Lacey's search takes him to the Glass House, a sordid gaming hell that played a large part in the victim's past, as well as to gatherings of the haut ton and the chambers of
...The Sudbury School Murders
by Ashley Gardner
1817. Captain Lacey takes a post as a secretary at the Sudbury School in Berkshire, a school for sons of the wealthiest merchants and bankers in England. Lacey discovers as soon as he arrives that he's been hired for more than his letter-writing skills—a series of disturbing pranks have kept the school in an uproar, and the headmaster expects Lacey to discover the identity of the prankster.
...London 1816
Returning home through a sticky London night in July 1816, Captain Gabriel Lacey is surprised to spy a well-dressed, elegant woman stride to the middle of an unfinished bridge. Following her in curiosity, Lacey is on hand to rescue her from an attack by a footpad. Lacey takes her to his own rooms in a street off Covent Garden to rest.
She is one Lydia Westin, wife of Colonel Roehampton Westin, who has recently been accused
...When I agree to visit Grenville in his villa near Rome, I scarcely imagine that I immediately will become embroiled in mystery and mayhem. James Denis has requested that I purchase an antique from a collector, one Conte de Luca. Before I can approach this count, I am recruited by a Roman a man to help rescue his daughter from a cool aristocrat, and then asked to solve the murder of an Englishman—by a man who is already dead.
These
...Captain Gabriel Lacey accompanies famous dandy Lucius Grenville to Egypt, a land that Lacey has long anticipated visiting. Lacey travels there for more than a simple holiday, however—James Denis has tasked him with finding an "object" from ancient Alexandria and procuring it, whatever the cost.
The task does not turn out to be so simple. Locating what Denis wants proves difficult, sending Lacey and Grenville exploring tombs
...James Denis gives Captain Lacey a task, to deliver a mysterious package to a man with an office near the Custom House on the bank of the Thames. Lacey, who has been drawn into danger delivering items for Denis before, opens the package to find a single chess piece, a white queen.
The piece tells Lacey nothing, but he soon realizes it plays deeply into Denis's ongoing battle for control of London's underworld.
Meanwhile Lacey
...Captain Lacey is drawn into affairs of the highest in the land when his friend Grenville is asked by the Prince Regent to look into odd happenings in his lavish abode of Carlton House. Objects of value have gone missing, paintings and sculpture have been moved, and some of the staff have reported strange sounds and movements in the shadows. The Regent and his cronies suspect ghosts or other malign spirits.
The Bow Street Runners have
...When Captain Gabriel Lacey finds himself standing over a dead body in Brighton Pavilion, bloody sword in hand and no memory of how he got there, he immediately fears he is a murderer.
The dead man is Colonel Hamilton Isherwood, a man Lacey clashed with after the battle of Salamanca in Spain seven years before. As Lacey tries to piece together the events of the previous night, he discovers he'd promised to help a Quaker gentleman find his
...London, 1819: When Brewster, my bodyguard, comes to me about a murder of a pugilist—and what's more, says his wife has summoned me—I must hasten to St. Giles to find a killer before Brewster is arrested for the crime. This is made difficult because my wife's late husband's odious cousin has materialized to try to wrest her son into his care. After all, seven-year-old Peter is a viscount, and his cousin wants to get closer to the title.
...17) The Dybbuk
In the folklore of Eastern European Jewry, a dybbuk is a wandering soul that comes to rest in the body of a living person. In this case, the dybbuk is an impoverished student that possesses a young bride on her wedding day. She is taken to a great Chassidic rabbi for exorcism. But before he can expel the spirit, the sage must discover who the dybbuk was in life, why he has possessed the maiden, and most importantly, how to balance the scales of
...