Murder, Department Stores, and Other Sources of Distinction
(2026)(The fourth book in the Gilded Age: Fortunes & Folly Fellowship series)
A novel by Marisa Paxon
I am the poor wretch who carried this story from first glove to final kiss, and now, because they are never content with mere narration, I am apparently expected to sell it as well. Very good. Drag yourself in.
Beatrice Loxley arrives in Chicago to teach an American department store the finer points of English taste, which is already a doomed enough occupation before the place produces a corpse in a model drawing room and expects her to behave normally about it. I watched her correct tea tables, social disasters, and several women with too much money and too little shame; then Mrs. Cordelia Pike, who ran private clients with velvet charm and account-book teeth, ended up dead beside the hearth. So now Beatrice must sort out a murder hidden inside cards, invoices, bells, copper wire, and the sort of respectable panic that flourishes best under good upholstery, all while Mr. Jonas Archer, a disturbingly practical American with the manners of a locked freight door, keeps turning up wherever the danger and the deductions are thickest.
It is, in other words, a sharp, funny historical cozy mystery set inside a glittering Chicago department store, where commerce, class, and social ambition are forever trying to kill one another with better drapery. I had to carry every deliciously awful suspect: the ladies with private accounts, the decorator with too much nerve, the manager who mistakes administration for morality, and the alarming possibility that if Beatrice does not untangle the whole thing, she may lose not just her position, but her chance to belong in this noisy, overbuilt city at all. Exhausting for me, naturally; excellent for you.
If you enjoy prickly competence, murder among the well-dressed, romantic friction sharpened by mutual usefulness, and a heroine who can read a room, a ledger, and a fool at twenty paces, this will be very much your sort of trouble.
Expect a clue-rich mystery with a satisfying logical reveal, non-gory violence, and a very low heat, closed-door romance that ends on a thoroughly satisfying HFN. It stands perfectly well on its own, which is more than can be said for half the people in it. Go on, then: click Look Inside or buy the thing, and let me show you how badly respectability behaves when money, murder, and attraction all arrive before tea.
Beatrice Loxley arrives in Chicago to teach an American department store the finer points of English taste, which is already a doomed enough occupation before the place produces a corpse in a model drawing room and expects her to behave normally about it. I watched her correct tea tables, social disasters, and several women with too much money and too little shame; then Mrs. Cordelia Pike, who ran private clients with velvet charm and account-book teeth, ended up dead beside the hearth. So now Beatrice must sort out a murder hidden inside cards, invoices, bells, copper wire, and the sort of respectable panic that flourishes best under good upholstery, all while Mr. Jonas Archer, a disturbingly practical American with the manners of a locked freight door, keeps turning up wherever the danger and the deductions are thickest.
It is, in other words, a sharp, funny historical cozy mystery set inside a glittering Chicago department store, where commerce, class, and social ambition are forever trying to kill one another with better drapery. I had to carry every deliciously awful suspect: the ladies with private accounts, the decorator with too much nerve, the manager who mistakes administration for morality, and the alarming possibility that if Beatrice does not untangle the whole thing, she may lose not just her position, but her chance to belong in this noisy, overbuilt city at all. Exhausting for me, naturally; excellent for you.
If you enjoy prickly competence, murder among the well-dressed, romantic friction sharpened by mutual usefulness, and a heroine who can read a room, a ledger, and a fool at twenty paces, this will be very much your sort of trouble.
Expect a clue-rich mystery with a satisfying logical reveal, non-gory violence, and a very low heat, closed-door romance that ends on a thoroughly satisfying HFN. It stands perfectly well on its own, which is more than can be said for half the people in it. Go on, then: click Look Inside or buy the thing, and let me show you how badly respectability behaves when money, murder, and attraction all arrive before tea.
Used availability for Marisa Paxon's Murder, Department Stores, and Other Sources of Distinction