Murder, Heiresses, and Other Things to Experience in America: A Cozy Gilded Age Mystery of Love and Murder
Marisa Paxon
I am the narrator of this book. I carried the whole wretched affair on my back, tidied the clues, endured the feelings, and now they have decided I must sell it as well. Very well: come to America, where an English companion is dragged to a Hudson River mansion to help land a rich bride for a bankrupt lord, only to find the heiress unimpressed, the household overmanaged, and the gentleman in question at the bottom of an elevator shaft with his neck broken and everyone pretending surprise.
Eleanor Whitcombe is clever enough to know when a room has turned dangerous, and Cedar Hill turns dangerous in style: old letters, new money, family panic, a defective lift with social ambitions, and one dead aristocrat who had been trying to marry fortune by persistence. I watched her do what useful women are forever made to do, namely notice everything while the grander idiots make arrangements, and then I watched her meet Samuel Hale, an American investigator with the very inconvenient habit of preferring facts to decorum. It is dreadful for everyone concerned, which is why it works.
If Eleanor fails, the wrong woman is ruined, the right people go on calling malice management, and one ugly death becomes the sort of tidy lie rich families live on for years. I assure you, there are suspects enough, motives enough, and more than enough people trying to improve the truth into something respectable.
Perfect for readers who like historical house party murder with sharp social comedy, Anglo-American culture clash, observant heroines, and the sort of slow-burn investigator chemistry that begins in mutual professional irritation and gets steadily less safe from there.
This is a clue-rich, non-gory historical mystery with a satisfying logical reveal, and it comes with a closed-door romance and a hard-won HEA, because I suffered through the entire business and insist on compensation. If you enjoy clever women, dangerous households, dry wit, and murder conducted beneath very expensive ceilings, open the book and let me show you how badly these people behaved.
