Showing results for "The War of the Worlds" in Women Sleuths

Staff wanted. Prospects excellent. Death - or worse - a certainty. When fourteen year old Rosie is knocked down one foggy evening, Dr Margaret Demeray suspects she had been escaping procurers masquerading as an employment agency. But the police are more interested in the cold blooded murder of a respectable man than the procurement of naive, impoverished girls, and Rosie won’t talk, other than to beg Margaret to stop her friend Violet being caught by the same people. Then the discovery of a dead boy during one of Fox’s missions raises more questions than it answers.

Three very different women are recruited to the mysterious Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla has the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses - but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, working to translate decoded enemy secrets. Self-made Mab masters the legendary codebreaking machines as she conceals old wounds and the poverty of her East-End London upbringing. And shy local girl Beth is the outsider who trains as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts.

Set in 1949 Paris, Slim Moran runs the Pitchipoi Agency with her Nazi Hunter boyfriend, Daniel. Their specialty: to find those lost in the last war. After a couple of easy cases, business has ground to halt, and Daniel has just gone on another manhunt this time to find the Nazi Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Slim is bored until a British spymistress asks her to find a missing woman spy long presumed dead.

December 1942. As the war rages on, the accidental death of a young man is almost unremarkable. Except this young man was patrolling the grounds of Hursley Park House, where teams are designing crucial modifications to the Spitfire - and he was found clutching part of a blueprint. January 1943. Josephine Fox is given a code name and a mission as she is seconded to Hursley: uncover the network responsible for information leaks to the enemy.

June 1910. Fighting her corner in a man’s world, Dr. Margaret Demeray works as a pathologist in a London hospital for the poor. Suppressing her worry that she’s breaching confidentiality, Margaret gives a stranger called Fox information about a dead down-and-out, in the hope he’ll use it to raise awareness of bad working conditions. But when a second man appears to die the same way, Margaret starts to wonder why the enigmatic Fox keeps turning up to ask ever more complex questions. She decides to work alone, uncertain of his motives and wary of her attraction to him.

April 1941, Romsey, England. Josephine 'Josy' Fox hasn't set foot in Romsey in over 20 years. As an illegitimate child, her family - headed by her controlling grandfather - found her an embarrassment. Now, she wants to return to what was once her home and uncover the secret of her parentage. Who was her father, and why would her mother never talk about him? Josy arrives the day after the Luftwaffe have bombed the town.

1915, London: Working in the dusty bookshop that her Aunt Violet mysteriously inherited, Hannah Merrill is accustomed to finding twists in every tale. But discovering her beloved best friend Lily-Anne – with a paperknife through her heart – in the middle of the bookshop, is not a plotline she saw coming. The case is anything but textbook. With the discovery of a coded German message, and Hannah’s instinct that Lily-Anne’s husband is keeping secrets, she determines to get to the bottom of it. She can’t do it alone though.

It is 1940 and bombs are falling on London. Watching from her attic window, Charlotte sees enemy planes coming in over the city, and her neighbours' homes destroyed. Still grieving her beloved brother who never returned from France, Charlotte has moved away from her overbearing family and built a new life for herself. She works as a typist for the Ministry of Information, rents a room on the top floor of Mrs Callaghan's ramshackle house, and shares gin and confidences with her best friend, Elena.

June 1944, Romsey, England. Josephine 'Jo' Fox is at an impasse since the unwelcome return of her wayward husband Richard. So, when he disappears again, she is neither concerned nor surprised—until a burning car is discovered with a body inside. And there are signs that Richard is somehow involved. Jo is determined to find both her husband and answers, yet with her friend Bram Nash in hospital suffering an infection of his old war wound, she must do so alone. When information comes to light that implicates Bram too, Jo finds herself on a dangerous path to the truth.

1914: Sixteen-year-old Etterly, running from something, hides inside the trunk of a tree and disappears. The police search but find no trace. Her family and friends wrack their brains but come up with nothing. And so slowly life returns to normal. The hole in the tree is boarded up, and the village of Sackwater moves on. Only Etterly's best friend, Betty, clings to hope, insisting she can hear her friend calling for help. 1940: A skeleton is discovered buried in the woods....

Sometimes the past won't stay hidden, it demands to be uncovered. The Forgotten Life of Arthur Pettinger is a moving story from best-selling author Suzanne Fortin. Arthur Pettinger's memory isn't what it used to be. He can't always remember the names of his grandchildren, where he lives or which way round his slippers go. He does remember Maryse though, a woman he hasn't seen for decades, but whose face he will never forget.

It is 1939 - war has been declared, and spymaster Fitzroy wastes no time in preparing his goddaughter, Hope, for a secret mission. As Euphemia Martins' daughter, Hope has the potential to be one of British Intelligence's greatest agents, but when she is ousted from an all-male think tank and relegated to the typing pool, even she starts to doubt herself. Meanwhile, Hope's rebellious friend, Bernie, announces her engagement to a man Hope does not trust; Harvey, Hope's only asset, has vanished; and, most awful of all, Hope fears that her father is dying.

1940. It's been a month since rector's daughter Billie Harkness left her rural village to make a fresh start in the northern city of Hull. Now she has a new home and an exciting new job as one of only two female police constables in the whole city. But Hull still feels like a foreign country, and some people are less than impressed by the idea of a woman doing a "man's job". But determined to do her bit for the war effort, Billie throws herself into her work. The chance to prove her worth comes during a search for a missing air raid shelter inspector, when Billie makes a shocking discovery.

1939, London: From McPhail's Passage to Kensington's Grand Palace Hotel, Rose Dunbar is evacuated from her humble home on the Rock of Gibraltar and dropped into a chaotic city of falling bombs, perplexing class rules and bad weather. Despite being 'flagrantly foreign' to the locals, she becomes an efficient go-between for the upper-class ladies helping out with the war effort and her own tribe of noisy displaced families.

When newlyweds Agnes and Andrew Kinghof are present for the discovery of an over-ripe corpse in the air-raid shelter of their apartment building, the two set out to put their amateur detective skills to work. The dead man's sister is nearly frightened to death by the appearance of a grinning pig's head outside her window, and she claims to be threatened by someone calling himself 'The Pig'. The newlyweds deduce that it must be someone who lives in the same apartment building.

Halina Shore is a Polish born forensic dentist living in Australia. When she travels to Poland to take part in the investigation of a war crime, she finds herself at the center of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy. As the investigation proceeds, her professional assignment becomes a confronting personal odyssey as the truth about her own past begins to emerge.

World War II comes to Farleigh Place, the ancestral home of Lord Westerham and his five daughters, when a soldier with a failed parachute falls to his death on the estate. After his uniform and possessions raise suspicions, MI5 operative and family friend Ben Cresswell is covertly tasked with determining if the man is a German spy. The assignment also offers Ben the chance to be near Lord Westerham's middle daughter, Pamela, whom he furtively loves. But Pamela has her own secret.

September 1941. While on a delivery, young Freddie Hackett, a message runner for a government office, witnesses an argument that ends in murder. Crouching in the doorway of a bombed-out house, Freddie waits until the coast is clear. But when he arrives at the delivery address, he's shocked to come face to face with the killer. Dismissed by the police when he attempts to report the crime, Freddie goes in search of a woman he once met when delivering a message: Maisie Dobbs.

When a Quaker Kindertransport chaperone is murdered in the East End of London, Britain’s counterintelligence spymaster tasks Olivia Denis to join the group rescuing children from Nazi Germany. Olivia must find not only a killer, but a traitor relaying sensitive material to the enemy. Once they reach Berlin, Olivia discovers she must rescue the family of an imprisoned British spy before she leaves the next day.

England, 1917. Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick - but she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion. Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella - sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs - and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.