Mrs. Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, while tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life--a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she's never wanted anything so badly. Determined to make her dream come true, Mrs. Harris scrimps and saves...

Set in eighteenth-century Spitalfields, London, Blackberry and Wild Rose is the rich and atmospheric tale of a household of Huguenot silk weavers as the pursuit of the perfect silk design leads them all into ambition, love, and betrayal. When Esther Thorel, wife of a master silk weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel, she thinks she is doing God's will, but her good deed is not returned. Sara quickly realizes that the Thorel household is built on...

From the acclaimed author of the bestselling Italian Fever comes a fresh twist on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, a novel told from the perspective of Mary Reilly, Dr. Jekyll's dutiful and intelligent housemaid.

"A single twist of fate puts a servant girl to work in Queen Victoria's royal kitchen, setting off a suspenseful, historical mystery ... Isabella Waverly only means to comfort the woman felled on a London street. In her final dying moments, she thrusts a letter into Bella's hand. It's an offer of employment in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace, and everything the budding young chef desperately wants: an escape from the constrictions of her life as...

London, 1893. Elderly Mrs. Bentley is on her deathbed, and her son Robert has returned from France. But in the Bentleys’ well-appointed home, everyone has their secrets, including Robert’s beautiful and elusive wife, the orphan maid she hires from the country, and the mysterious young woman who arrives, claiming to be the bride of Robert’s drowned brother.
Robert is quickly developing a reputation in anthropometry, the nascent...

Leila Aboulela's American debut is a provocative, timely, and engaging novel about a young Muslim woman - once privileged and secular in her native land and now impoverished in London - gradually embracing her orthodox faith. With her Muslim hijab and down-turned gaze, Najwa is invisible to most eyes, especially to the rich families whose houses she cleans in London. Twenty years ago, Najwa, then at university in Khartoum, would never have imagined...

The mysterious deaths of two adored cats plunges Bea into the disturbing goings-on of the Tredgold family in the latest Abbot Agency mystery. Wealthy Marcia Tredgold and her daughter, Charlotte, want Bea Abbot to find them replacements for staff who have left under a cloud. Bea discovers that all those dismissed were close to Marcia Tredgold, and senses that something is not right. Were they framed, and if so by whom - and why? Even more curiously,...

The Continent, 1864: Two bomb attacks, three deaths. Clues to an elaborate assassination plot are intercepted in Paris, and the authorities believe the assassin's lair lies in Soho, London. When Heloise Chancey, courtesan and professional detective, takes on a wealthy client who requests that she meet a mysterious man in his stead, she never dreams it will lead to her going undercover to spy upon the nest of plotters and end their murderous conspiracy....