Bella Wallis Victorian Mysteries
5 total works
So when Bella discovers a crested cigar case at the scene of a murdered prostitute she and her friends are determined to solve the mystery and to avenge the wretched girl's death. But the owner of the coat of arms is a dangerous and powerful man, and the world he inhabits far murkier than Bella could ever have imagined. With cruelty and violence threatening to engulf her, she plots one last attempt to expose and denounce the murderer. Bella Wallis, widow and writer, must put pen to paper before her nemesis silences her for ever.
London, 1875. At Lady Cornford's famous soiree (sugared almonds and tittle-tattle) everyone is gossiping about Henry Ellis Margam's latest hit, The Widow's Secret. Only a few people know that one of Lady C's guests, the enigmatic Bella Wallis, is in fact the bestselling novelist. Bella punishes evil-doers by exposing them as thinly-disguised characters in the books she writes under her male pseudonym. Armed with her pen, the handsome Miss Wallis surrounds herself with useful men: the dashing Philip Westland, possibly a government spy; Captain Quigley, Bella's fixer, and his shady assistant, Murch, who can always crack a bone or two when someone needs persuading.
Westland comes to Bella with a problem: his best friend Kennett is smitten by the heiress Miss Mary Skillane. But Mary's father, Sir William is 'an old fraud with a beautiful daughter' and she has been promised to Robert Judd, a vulgar treasure seeker. Mary is due to inherit the Skillane pearls, currently residing in a red lacquer box in a Cornish bank vault. But the pearls it seems were ill-gotten, and as Bella and her band uncover more of the strange business, a new Henry Ellis Margam novel looks set to be written, if Bella can first side-step her own affairs of the heart, and evade a brutal threat to her life...
We start with The Widow's Secret, an effervescent romp to Paris on the trail of the owner of a mysterious cigar case; then The Sailor's Ransom, a tale of pearls and swine, set on the Cornish coast and the high seas; and The Player's Curse, where kidnap, cricket and cross-dressing coincide in a riotous mystery. We end with the previously unpublished The Whole Story, in which Bella is caught up in an anarchist bomb attack at her favourite restaurant, Fracatelli's on the Strand... and only just survives to tell the tale.
Bella Wallis – respectable society widow with a secret identity as a writer of sensationalist novels – is now happily engaged to the love of her life, Philip Westland. But Westland’s shadowy job, working for the British government, continually takes him abroad and away from the charismatic, impatient Bella. And then there is the matter of Westland’s sister’s incarceration in a French nunnery, a mystery about which he refuses to say a word.
Bella is convinced that their future together can only be resolved by getting to the bottom of his secret. The resulting quest will take her from the Oval, and a vicious curse laid on champion batsman W.G Grace, to the desolate moors of Yorkshire, on the trail of some decidedly dangerous women and a surprisingly chatty hermit…
London is alive with gossip about the thrilling new book by sensationalist author Henry Ellis Margam, but only a select group of people know that the real author is beautiful widow, and member of high society, Bella Wallis.
One of her confidantes is the dashing Philip Westland, who comes to Bella now with a problem: his best friend Kennet is smitten with the heiress Mary Skillane but Mary's father, Sir William, has promised her to Robert Judd, a vulgar treasure-seeker. Mary is due to inherit the Skillane pearls, which are currently residing in a Cornsih bank vault, but it seems that the pearls were ill-gotten.
Can Bella and her friends reunite the young lovers and escape the attention of the villainous Judd?