KAREN CHARLTON
  • Home
  • Author
  • The York Ladies' Detective Agency Mysteries
    • The Mystery of Mad Alice Lane
    • Smoke & Cracked Mirrors
    • Dancing With Dusty Fossils
  • The Detective Lavender Mysteries
    • The Heiress of Linn Hagh
    • The Sans Pareil Mystery
    • The Sculthorpe Murder
    • Plauge Pits & River Bones
    • Murder on Park Lane
    • The Willow Marsh Murder
  • Detective Lavender Short Stories
    • Death At The Frost Fair
    • The Death of Irish Nell
    • The Piccadilly Pickpocket
    • The Mystery of the Skelton Diamonds
  • Catching the Eagle & February 1909
    • Catching the Eagle
    • February 1809
  • Seeking Our Eagle
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Events
  • Genealogy
    • James Charlton Senior (1700-1770)
    • John Charlton (1746-1818)
    • 'Pious John' Charlton (1769-)
    • James 'Jamie' Charlton (1774- )
    • The mysterious William Charlton
    • The Family Tree: Ten generations
Welcome to the official website of historical novelist KAREN CHARLTON

SMOKE & CRACKED MIRRORS

Picture
York, England: 1940

​‘An unsuitable job for a woman…’

When her husband goes ‘missing in action’, Jemma James returns to the city of her birth to set up a private detective agency with her best friend, Roberta ‘Bobbie’ Baker, with whom she shares a passionate love of Golden Age crime fiction.


​These two enterprising young women soon find themselves embroiled in a series of mysterious cases, shadowing blackmailers and bigamists, and investigating the perplexing history of a wealthy young woman who seems determined to wipe out her past. And it’s not long before they stumble across an unsolved murder.


But the dead don’t stay dead for long in historic York.


As the ‘phoney war’ draws to a close, and the sky above the soaring twin towers of the twelfth century Minster darkens with menace, Jemma learns that even she is not above suspicion in wartime Britain.


Smoke and Cracked Mirrors is the first full-length novel of the series and is available on Amazon in eBook, paperback and audiobook formats. Paperbacks are also available through good book stores.
Buy Here