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.

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.