Book picks similar to
The Cavalier of the Apocalypse by Susanne Alleyn


mystery
historical-fiction
historical-mystery
france

Limelight


Emily Organ - 2017
    Actress Lizzie Dixie drowned in the River Thames, so how was she murdered five years later in Highgate Cemetery?Intrepid Fleet Street reporter Penny Green was a friend of Lizzie’s and Scotland Yard needs her help. Does Penny unwittingly hold clues to Lizzie’s mysterious death? Penny must work with Inspector James Blakely to investigate the worlds of theatre, showmen and politicians in search of the truth.But who is following her? And who is sending her threatening letters?Penny is about to discover that Lizzie’s life was more complicated, and dangerous, than she could ever have imagined.If you like a murder mystery then you'll love this atmospheric Victorian mystery by Emily Organ.

Two Tocks before Midnight


Clay Boutwell - 2012
     But among the members, there is a traitor. Among the forgers, there is a murderer. As friends betray their own and souls are sentenced to death, suspicions and tensions mount. Only one man, Carl Brooke, has the knowledge and expertise to stop the murderer. But will he succeed? Or will the night of October 24th, 1859 forever remain an unresolved mystery? -- If you like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books or stories set in the 19th century and with a touch of mystery, you will love Two Tocks before Midnight. This is the first in the Agora mystery series. Carl Brooke and the Agora society’s crime-solving escapades continue with additional stories. If you would like to read them all, please search for "The Agora Letters" for five stories for the price of three.

Secrets at Wallisford Hall


C.G. Oster - 2017
    Domestic service had never been an intended career for Dory, but a plea from family could never be ignored, even, as it turns out, when her predecessor had been murdered in the very house Dory now worked. A stranger was blamed for the death, and Lord and Lady Wallisford and their grown children were not giving Detective Inspector Ridley from the Met an easy time to investigate alternative theories. No strangers had been seen in the district and Dory, with her position in the house, is increasingly drawn in the help.

The Butterfly Conspiracy


Vivian Conroy - 2018
    In late Victorian times, when new inventions cause both excitement and terror, a mysterious death at a zoological lecture brings together two unlikely allies in a quest through London's upper crust and underbelly to unravel the ingenious murder method and killer behind it.Miss Merula Merriweather is not like other women her age: instead of hunting for a husband at balls and soirees she spends her time in a conservatory hatching exotic creatures. As the Royal Zoological Society won't accept a woman's accomplishments, she has her uncle Rupert take credit for her achievements. But at a zoological lecture, the guest of honor dies after contact with one of Merula's butterflies, and Merula's uncle is arrested for murder. In an attempt to safeguard evidence to prove his innocence, Merula almost gets killed but for the timely interference of enigmatic Lord Raven Royston. Viewing natural history as a last resort to regain respectability lost by too many dubious business investments, Raven didn't expect his first lecture to take a murderous turn. Feeling partially responsible because he encouraged Merula to release the gigantic butterfly from the glass case in which it was kept, Raven suggests they solve the puzzle of Lady Sophia's sudden death together by looking closer at her relations with estranged friends, long suffering staff and the man groomed to be her heir, so close to her money and yet unable to touch any of it. With the police looking for them, and every new discovery raising more questions than answers, especially about the murder method which left no traces of foul play on the body, Merula will have to risk her own life to get at the truth and save her uncle from the gallows in The Butterfly Conspiracy, Vivian Conroy’s enchanting series debut.

The Devil in Montmartre: A Mystery in Fin de Siècle Paris


Gary Inbinder - 2014
    Hysterical rumors swirl that Jack the Ripper has crossed the Channel, and Inspector Achille Lefebvre enters the Parisian underworld to track down the brutal killer. His suspects are the artist Toulouse-Lautrec; Jojo, an acrobat at the Circus Fernando, and Sir Henry Collingwood, a mysterious English gynecologist and amateur artist.Pioneering the as-yet-untried system of fingerprint detection and using cutting edge forensics, including crime scene photography, anthropometry, pathology, and laboratory analysis, Achille attempts to separate the innocent from the guilty. But he must work quickly before the “Paris Ripper” strikes again.

Season of the Raven


Denise Domning - 2014
    Saddled with a clerk who names Faucon his ‘penance', the shire’s first Crowner must thread the tangled relationships between the sheriff, the village of Priors Holston and the priory that once ruled it. As a simple task takes a turn to the political, what seems obvious isn’t and what appears safe turns out to be more dangerous than he could imagine.

The Thief-Taker


T.F. Banks - 2001
    When Henry Morton is called to the scene at Portman House in Claridge Square, the Bow Street constable finds a man dead in a hackney coach--ostensibly of asphyxiation. He was Halbert Glendinning, a gentleman of unsullied character. Then why was he seen frequenting one of London’s most notorious dens of iniquity? And why has the driver of the coach vanished into the night? While Sir Nathaniel Conant, the chief magistrate at Number 4 Bow Street, accepts the official verdict of accidental death, Morton is certain that Glendinning was a victim of foul play. With the help of actress Arabella Malibrant, one of London’s most celebrated beauties, he embarks on his own discreet inquiry. And as the upper circles of London society close ranks against him, Morton races to unmask a killer whose motives are as complex and unfathomable as the passions that rule the human heart.

What Angels Fear


C.S. Harris - 2005
    Then a beautiful young woman is found raped and savagely murdered on the altar steps of an ancient church near Westminster Abbey. A dueling pistol discovered at the scene and the damning testimony of a witness both point to one man, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a brilliant young nobleman shattered by his experience in the Napoleonic Wars.Now a fugitive running for his life, Sebastian calls upon his skill as an agent during the war to catch the killer and prove his own innocence. In the process, he accumulates a band of unlikely allies, including the enigmatic beauty Kat Boleyn, who broke Sebastian's heart years ago. In Sebastian's world of intrigue and espionage, nothing is as it seems, yet the truth may hold the key to the future of the British monarchy, as well as to Sebastian's own salvation....

Her Royal Spyness


Rhys Bowen - 2007
    She's gate-crashed a wedding... She's making money by secretly cleaning houses... And she's been asked to spy for Her Majesty the Queen.Everything seems to be going swimmingly until she finds a body in her bathtub... and someone is definitely trying to kill her.Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins

The Secret Life of Anna Blanc


Jennifer Kincheloe - 2015
    Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world women are not allowed to hunt criminals. Determined to break free of the era's rigid social roles, she buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are covering up. Seizing her one chance to solve a crime, she takes on the investigation herself. If the police find out, she'll get fired; if her father finds out, he'll disown her; and if her fiancé finds out, he'll cancel the wedding.Anna must choose--either hunt the villain and risk losing her father, fiancé, and wealth, or abandon her dream and leave the killer on the loose.

Stone's Fall


Iain Pears - 2009
    In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race.Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle–an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely–and marks the triumphant return of one of the world’s great storytellers.

Face Down in the Marrow-Bone Pie


Kathy Lynn Emerson - 1997
    It came from Lancashire. John Bexwith, my steward at Appleton Manor, is dead."Susanna frowned, surprised that this news should have affected her husband so strongly. "The man was quite elderly," she said hesitantly, "was he not?""Your memory is excellent," Robert told her, absently tucking an unruly lock of dark brown hair back up under her brocaded cap. "He was found face down in a marrow-bone pie."With that incredible statement, Robert placed the letter in his wife's outstretched hand.Face Down in the Marrow-Bone Pie is a delightfully cozy Elizabethan mystery introducing Susanna, Lady Appleton. When her husband's steward dies in a unique, ignominious, and highly suspicious manner, Susanna takes advantage of her husband's absence on a political mission for Queen Elizabeth to investigate Bexwith's mysterious demise.The serving wench who found Bexwith claims that he was frightened to death by a ghost, but Susanna can think of several poisons that could have been concealed in the marrow-bone pie. (Susanna is something of an expert on poisons, having been inspired by her sister's fatal encounter with some poisonous berries to write a cautionary herbal for housewives.)Even if Bexwith was poisoned, was it accidental or intentional? As if the case weren't complicated enough, Susanna must also unmask a "ghost"-- or are the ghost and the poisoner one and the same?Kathy Lynn Emerson's debut Elizabethan mystery will delight as it introduces you to a sixteenth-century husband's worst nightmare: an intelligent, no-nonsense wife who happens to know hundreds of poisons.

A Fete Worse Than Death


Dolores Gordon-Smith - 2007
    But then Jack's fellow officer, Jeremy Boscombe, is found dead in the fortune teller's tent and later the same day Boscombe's shady friend, Reggie Morton, is murdered in the village pub. Jack's search for the truth will lead him back to the Battle of the Somme and an act of terrible betrayal.

The Winter Queen


Boris Akunin - 1998
    There are many unresolved questions. Why, for instance, have both victims left their fortunes to an orphanage run by the English Lady Astair? And who is the beautiful "A.B.," whose signed photograph is found in the apparent suicide's apartment? Relying on his keen intuition, the eager sleuth plunges into an investigation that leads him across Europe, landing him at the deadly center of a terrorist conspiracy of worldwide proportions.

The Countess of Prague


Stephen Weeks - 2017
    The assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo that summer effectively ended the Old Europe into which she was born to a noble Czech father and an English mother. Through the lens of Trixie, whose own journey from pampered aristocrat (albeit in a polite and impoverished marriage) to a degree of emancipation has an exciting yet humorous and sympathetic dynamic, we witness stirring events and societal shifts. Trixie begins her new career at 28. She's leading a society life and growing apart from her husband although she is as yet too conventional to take a lover. When the brutalized body of an old man once under the command of her military uncle is fished from the Vltava, she takes to the role of a detective and finds solace in it, mixing with ease with kings and princes, but never losing touch with ordinary men and women with whom her new role often puts her in contact. Investigating alters the formality of her relations with her servants and with public officials as we see when she encounters her butler in an unexpected role (and place) and then goes undercover (as a young man) on a train journey to Paris and London. Eventually, liaising with various officials, she arrives at Marienbad, the famous Czech spa, where Edward VII of England and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm have staged a surprising May meeting....and it is here that the mystery unfolds.