Murder in the Subscription Reading Caravanserai
(2026)(A book in the Regency: Ghostly Grievances Society series)
A novel by Marisa Paxon
I am the narrator of this book. I carried the whole affair on my back, kept the dead, the flirtation, the stationery, and the provincial foolishness in order, and now they have shoved me onto the product page as well, apparently on the theory that one exhausted intelligence ought to do everything.
So here you are: a cozy Regency mystery with a locked-room death, a quietly dangerous courtship, and one utterly insufferable ghost. Phoebe Loxley keeps her family’s Subscription Reading Caravanserai running with ledgers, good sense, and just enough social engineering to hide a lady’s scandalous novel inside improving wrappers. Then a pompous lecturer locks himself into the newspaper room to investigate a pencilled insult and is found dead on the carpet, with a brass peg on the floor, half the house under suspicion, and, shortly afterward, himself still hanging about to complain about the spacing on his lecture placard. Death, you see, has done nothing for his personality.
I had to watch Phoebe sort out a house full of liars, debtors, nervous readers, and one very grave Bath clerk, Gabriel Mordaunt, who has the unnerving habit of noticing everything, including her. There are torn advertisements, secret embarrassments, borrowed pencils, public respectability held together with wafers and nerve, and a ghost who is less interested in eternity than in whether his name has been abbreviated offensively in the hall. If Phoebe fails, she loses far more than a tidy explanation: her family’s house is stained by scandal, the wrong people may be ruined for the wrong reasons, and the one man with the sense to stand beside her may be sent away before either of them has the courage to call it what it is. Inconvenient, naturally. Everything worth having usually is.
Perfect for readers who like Regency settings, clue-rich country house style mysteries, dry comedy, nuisance ghosts, and a closed-door, low-heat romance with a hard-won HEA. The violence is non-gory, the investigation is clever, clue-rich, and logically satisfying, and this is a fully complete stand-alone story in the Ghostly Grievances Society world, so you may begin here without academic preparation. Heaven forbid anyone should have to improve themselves first.
If you want a murder solved with brains instead of melodrama, a romance conducted with dangerous competence, and a haunting that behaves like bad management with opinions, open the book and let me drag you in properly.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
So here you are: a cozy Regency mystery with a locked-room death, a quietly dangerous courtship, and one utterly insufferable ghost. Phoebe Loxley keeps her family’s Subscription Reading Caravanserai running with ledgers, good sense, and just enough social engineering to hide a lady’s scandalous novel inside improving wrappers. Then a pompous lecturer locks himself into the newspaper room to investigate a pencilled insult and is found dead on the carpet, with a brass peg on the floor, half the house under suspicion, and, shortly afterward, himself still hanging about to complain about the spacing on his lecture placard. Death, you see, has done nothing for his personality.
I had to watch Phoebe sort out a house full of liars, debtors, nervous readers, and one very grave Bath clerk, Gabriel Mordaunt, who has the unnerving habit of noticing everything, including her. There are torn advertisements, secret embarrassments, borrowed pencils, public respectability held together with wafers and nerve, and a ghost who is less interested in eternity than in whether his name has been abbreviated offensively in the hall. If Phoebe fails, she loses far more than a tidy explanation: her family’s house is stained by scandal, the wrong people may be ruined for the wrong reasons, and the one man with the sense to stand beside her may be sent away before either of them has the courage to call it what it is. Inconvenient, naturally. Everything worth having usually is.
Perfect for readers who like Regency settings, clue-rich country house style mysteries, dry comedy, nuisance ghosts, and a closed-door, low-heat romance with a hard-won HEA. The violence is non-gory, the investigation is clever, clue-rich, and logically satisfying, and this is a fully complete stand-alone story in the Ghostly Grievances Society world, so you may begin here without academic preparation. Heaven forbid anyone should have to improve themselves first.
If you want a murder solved with brains instead of melodrama, a romance conducted with dangerous competence, and a haunting that behaves like bad management with opinions, open the book and let me drag you in properly.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Marisa Paxon's Murder in the Subscription Reading Caravanserai