The Secret of the Forty Steps (Chronicles of a Lady Detective)

Money, love, and murder in 1880s Newport high society…

Pinkerton detective Penelope Hamilton is summoned to fashionable Newport to investigate the two-year-old death of a wealthy matron. Did she fall from the Cliff Walk's Forty Steps in the middle of the night, as was presumed, or was she pushed by her much-younger husband?

The case is personal this time, since Pen's client is her own mother—breaking her near-decade of silence—and the man under scrutiny is to marry Pen's cousin in a week's ...