Murder, Medal Cups, and the Viscount with Opinions
(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 wretched business, every forged paper, every dead gentleman, every longing glance over a ledger, and now they have decided I must sell it as well. Very well: here is your ghost-haunted Regency murder with a poisoned peppermint, a missing pedigree, and a dead viscount who refuses to be remembered for the wrong boots.
Miss Theodora Hemsley keeps order at a county agricultural exhibition, which is to say she spends her day sorting cattle, silver, and lies. Then Viscount Marbeck, alive for barely a page longer than is convenient, rises to object to a prize bull’s suspicious breeding, pops a peppermint from his silver comfit box, and drops dead at the rail. The pedigree sheet vanishes, the county begins behaving like a badly supervised henhouse, and Theodora discovers she has acquired not only a murder to solve, but Marbeck himself, still opinionated, still vain, and now inconveniently translucent.
This leaves her investigating fraud, poison, missing paperwork, and rural respectability with Gabriel Struan, a veterinary surgeon so competent it becomes deeply irritating. He is practical, sharp-eyed, unimpressed by nonsense, and exactly the sort of man one ought not to notice while chasing a killer through tents, ledgers, ribbons, and the social ruin of several extremely silly people. If Theodora fails, a murderer walks free, a public lie stands as the final record of a man’s death, and the wrong people keep their silver, their standing, and their dreadful self-satisfaction.
Perfect for readers who like Regency cozies with biting wit, clue-rich sleuthing, ghostly complications, and a closed-door romance that earns its HEA properly, instead of lurching at it like a drunk baronet.
What you are getting, since apparently I must now do contracts as well as narration, is a non-gory historical mystery with a satisfying logical solution, a dryly delicious ghost thread, and a very low-heat romance with a genuine HEA. If that sounds like your sort of trouble, open the book and let me do the rest.
Miss Theodora Hemsley keeps order at a county agricultural exhibition, which is to say she spends her day sorting cattle, silver, and lies. Then Viscount Marbeck, alive for barely a page longer than is convenient, rises to object to a prize bull’s suspicious breeding, pops a peppermint from his silver comfit box, and drops dead at the rail. The pedigree sheet vanishes, the county begins behaving like a badly supervised henhouse, and Theodora discovers she has acquired not only a murder to solve, but Marbeck himself, still opinionated, still vain, and now inconveniently translucent.
This leaves her investigating fraud, poison, missing paperwork, and rural respectability with Gabriel Struan, a veterinary surgeon so competent it becomes deeply irritating. He is practical, sharp-eyed, unimpressed by nonsense, and exactly the sort of man one ought not to notice while chasing a killer through tents, ledgers, ribbons, and the social ruin of several extremely silly people. If Theodora fails, a murderer walks free, a public lie stands as the final record of a man’s death, and the wrong people keep their silver, their standing, and their dreadful self-satisfaction.
Perfect for readers who like Regency cozies with biting wit, clue-rich sleuthing, ghostly complications, and a closed-door romance that earns its HEA properly, instead of lurching at it like a drunk baronet.
What you are getting, since apparently I must now do contracts as well as narration, is a non-gory historical mystery with a satisfying logical solution, a dryly delicious ghost thread, and a very low-heat romance with a genuine HEA. If that sounds like your sort of trouble, open the book and let me do the rest.
Used availability for Marisa Paxon's Murder, Medal Cups, and the Viscount with Opinions