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The Case of the Vanishing Viscount

Book 1 in Miss Temperance Vane, Enquiries

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by Beatrice Marlowe

London, 1903. Miss Temperance Vane has opened an enquiry agency for the sort of clients the police cannot be bothered to help — and there are, she is discovering, a great many such clients. Her offices sit on the ground floor of 12 Gower Street, her retainer is modest, her assistant Nell is sharper than any of them, and her methods are entirely her own. Her first proper commission arrives in the form of Miss Cordelia Ashworth, a respectable young woman whose fiancé, Viscount Reginald Fenwick, has vanished the day before their wedding. With him has gone a considerable fortune — money meant to rescue the family estate, and money that certain gentlemen had very particular reasons to want for themselves. Scotland Yard has called it a domestic matter. The family would prefer a quiet bride. Nobody, it seems, intends to look for the man at all. Temperance does intend to look. What she finds, in a rented room off Dorset Street and in the ledgers of a solicitor with too much patience and too little conscience, is not an elopement of the heart but a careful, calculating theft — and a viscount too drugged and too ashamed to cry for help. The trail runs through Fleet Street offices, a discreet gambling club off St. James's, and a household whose silence has been bought and paid for. Plotted with the clockwork fairness of an old-fashioned whodunit and told with the dry, observant wit of a heroine who refuses to be told where she may and may not go, The Case of the Vanishing Viscount is the opening of a brand-new Edwardian mystery series. Charmingly British, delightfully deadly, served with a twist of humour — and a heroine quite prepared to pour it herself.