Karen Charlton set her story in the Regency period, with an historical Bow Street Runner investigation as the basis of the plot. The investigation by a Bow Street Runner in itself was strange, since the Runners operated in New Westminster, a defined area of London town and under the jurisdiction of a specific magistrate. The author wrote that Lavender was inveigled by another magistrate to investigate this mysteriously missing heiress, but whether this was factually correct was not referenced with a source.

This novel could have been a splendid narrative on which to base a mystery and develop the characters in a far northern region of England, despite the anomaly of the investigators, but no ~ the plotting was clunky, the stilted prose was full of grammatical errors, and the detective came across as an inept plod. If the police had pursued the extremely obvious leads, the crime could have been solved within a few days of their arrival in the north. Apparently the author admits she wrote Lavender more like a twentieth-century detective than was likely true for the time, but I don't see any evidence of 20th-Century methodology or behaviour. ( )

Its 1809 and a young heiress, Helen Carnaby, has disappeared from her locked bedchamber at Linn Hagh in Northumberland . Her worried uncle hires Detective Lavender and Constable Woods to find his niece.
An enjoyable story, look forward to the next in the series. ( )

Good start to a detective series about the Regency Era and the Bow-street Runners. Called to the very cold Northlands to seek a missing heiress, Lavender finds that a Sherlockian locked door mystery is only the beginning.
Her brother and sister are not particularly committed to finding their younger half-sister. in fact, they are downright nasty to her and her disabled sibling. Disgruntled farmers and mysterious gypsies add lots of discord to the detecting arena. So, it is a fine but interesting mess that the detecting team must contend with. The gun-toting Spanish Lady could be a bridge to further entries in the series but yet to de determined. ( )

I stumbled across this on Amazon, and it was only a quid, so I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a crime novel set in Regency England. I’ve always liked novels set in Regency England, such as, er, Heyer, and the occasional Signet and Zebra romance. And the late Kate Ross did write four really good crime novels set in Regency England. Anyway, I bought it, I read it. I think I have less of a problem with the setting and character than many of those reviewing it on Goodreads. The lead was a real historical character and the author admits she wrote him more like a twentieth-century detective than was likely true for the time. But that’s your “suspension of disbelief”, and I duly suspended it as required. Sadly, the book suffered from bad writing and inconsistent plotting. On the whole, I thought Charlton managed the period quite well, and her protagonists were not entirely reliant on cliché, but the poor prose discourages me from reading the rest of the series. ( )

Disappointing at best. ( )