Nell Bray

It's springtime in Biarritz, France – and playtime for Edwardian society. But the fashionable crowd is shaken by the suicide of a high-class prostitute, Topaz Brown, who has left her fortune to England's suffragette movement. Suffragette Nell Bray is sent to Biarritz to protect the money and keep its embarrassing source private. She gets more than she bargained for, however, when she learns that Topaz's death may not have been suicide at all. She's also busy tracking one of her wilder suffragette sisters, who arrives unexpectedly in town with a gun in her bag and her sights set on an MP. As her investigation takes her through Biarritz's tawdry slums and elegant boulevards, Nell may have taken on more than she can handle.

World War I is at its height, and amateur sleuth Nell Bray is dedicating herself to the suffragette movement. Her friend Jenny is hard at work at Nantgarrew military hospital, which specializes in Freudian analysis. When Jenny begs Nell to investigate the attempted murder of a patient, Nell heads for Nantgarrew to help. It is a mysterious place: someone is committing petty acts of sabotage to show their disapproval of Freud's theories; one soldier keeps a box of grenades and revolvers under his bed; and another is determined to reach Moscow by bicycle. Nell's bafflement turns to horror when the would-be assassin's aim finally turns true. Nantgarrew – devoted to healing – becomes the site of a murder, and Nell Bray is determined to solve it.

Verona North had seemed the perfect daughter. She'd surprised her friends by leaving her home to attend art school in London, but they'd thought it was a normal, youthful rebellion which wouldn't last very long. However, when she did return home in the summer of 1914, it was to die-pregnant and with her body full of morphine. Her cousin, Nell Bray, isn't wholly convinced she committed suicide and is positive she was not an addict. Unable to suppress her curiosity, Nell discovers that her cousin was leading a double life-on the one hand, consorting with a group of Bohemian artists and anarchists, and on the other, collecting information on the suspected "enemies of the state" for the secret service. But where did Verona's loyalty lie? with her family, her friends or her paymasters? What did she know that caused one of them to kill her, and who was the father of her child?

After three years of traipsing across Europe with her lovesick, widowed mother, Nell Bray has finally found her way to Oxford University. There she has befriended the beautiful Imogen and the charming Midge. When the three girls decide to accept an invitation by their male classmates to join a reading party in the country during vacation - accompanied by a dashing philosophy don with a reputation for stirring up trouble - they go against what is quickly becoming the obsolete conventions of the nineteenth-century. Once they arrive in the country, they are greeted by the unpleasant fact that their host has been accused of murder when a local boy is missing. Rather than return home, however, the six students and their mentor decide to put down their books and put their intellectual prowess to the test by solving the mystery. This combination of mystery and learning - with some college crushes and loves along the way - makes Dead Man Riding Gillian Linscott's best mystery to date.

When the suffragette movement is bequeathed a valuable painting by campaigner Philomena Venn, suffragette and amateur sleuth Nell Bray agrees to retrieve it. The plan is simple: Collect the picture from Philomena's widower, Oliver, take it to Christie's, and sell it to raise much-needed funds. But Nell is in for a surprise when she returns from the Vennes' home in the Cotswolds: The painting he has given her is a fake! When Oliver refuses to hand over the real painting, his son, political activist Daniel Venn, suggests an alternative plan to Nell: Why doesn't she break into the house and switch the paintings? Against her better judgment she agrees, and in the process she uncovers a far more serious crime--a brutal murder in which she is now personally embroiled... Once again, Gillian Linscott guides her delightfully starchy heroine through the politics, personalities, and perils of early twentieth-century England.