Davina Porter

When Clara vanishes after the puppeteer Grisini and two orphaned assistants were at her twelfth birthday party, suspicion of kidnapping chases the trio away from London and soon the two orphans are caught in a trap set by Grisini's ancient rival, a witch with a deadly inheritance to shed before it is too late.

Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel, Villette, explores the inner life of a lonely young Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, who leaves an unhappy existence in England to become a teacher in the capital of a fictional European country. Drawn to the school's headmaster, Lucy must face the pain of unrequited love and the question of her place in society.

At a celebration of Priscilla Halburton-Smythe's engagement, one guest in particular misbehaved. Boorish Captain Peter Bartlett managed to offend everyone--one person enough to kill him.

In Missalonghi, on Missy Wright's family's pitifully small homestead in Australia's Blue Mountains, It's a brand new century--the twentieth--a time for new thoughts and bold new actions. And Missy is about to set every self-righteous tongue in the town of Byron wagging! Sometimes fairy tales can come true-even for plain, shy spinsters like Missy Wright. Neither as pretty as cousin Alicianor as domineering as mother Drusilla, she seems doomed to a...

In 1766 Scotland, the laird of the clan, Angus McTern, has everything he wants in life. Although his grandfather lost the family's land and castle in a card game when Angus was just a boy, Angus takes his duties seriously and is respected by all the men and adored by the women. That is, until Edilean Talbot shows up. Breathtakingly beautiful and born of privilege, Edilean represents everything Angus despises. Still he is as dazzled by her as everyone...

"With each new novel, Anne Perry adds striking dimensions to the architecture of her fiction, building with inspired imagination a many-layered world of rich and poor, nobility and degradation. "She lifts the lace curtain from Victorian society," Sharyn McCrumb has said, "to reveal its shocking secrets." Like her last William Monk novel, this one brilliantly evokes England's nineteenth-century legal justice system and builds to a heart-stopping courtroom...

Isabel finds herself entangled in some tricky familial and financial situations that will require all of her kindness, charm, and philosophical expertise to navigate.
 
Just when Isabel and Jamie finally seem to have some time to connect and unwind, a wealthy Edinburgh resident reaches out to Isabel with an unusual request—he would like her to become the executor of his large Highland estate. Though Isabel initially demurs,...

Inspector Monk returns to the scene of another Victorian-era murder mystery when the daughter of an upper-crust family is stabbed in her own home. Inspector William Monk has his hands full when an aristocrat's daugher is stabbed to death in her own bed. He is instructed to proceed without delay, but finds his efforts hamstrung by the lingering traces of amnesia and the craven ineptitutde of his supervisor, who would love to see him fail. With the...

Everyone on Callander Square has something to hide-but someone will kill to keep a secret   When two dead infants are dug up in the Callander Square gardens, the upper-class residents dismiss the burials as the desperate act of a low-born girl and resent the intrusion of Inspector Thomas Pitt into their well-ordered lives. Pitt is not convinced that the case should be so easily dropped. Also intrigued by the mystery, Pitt's well-born wife, Charlotte,...

Twelve-year-old Elspeth Monro, a Scottish settler and weaver's apprentice on the North Carolina frontier in 1775, must find out who is betraying her Loyalist family during the months before the start of the Revolutionary War.