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.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
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.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Marisa Paxon's Murder, Medal Cups, and the Viscount with Opinions