Showing results by author "C. J. Archer" in All Categories

When the celebrated biographer of the infamous pirate Blackheart takes a suite at the Mayfair Hotel to live out his final months, Goliath the porter is desperate to ask the one question that has haunted treasure hunters for decades: Where is the loot buried? Forbidden to disturb a guest, he instead visits the man writing the author’s own life story, only to discover him dead at his desk. Accused of the crime, Goliath turns to Cleo and Harry to clear his name.

Summer has arrived along with a plethora of social events that keep Cleo and her cousins busy. Between balls, dinners, concerts and picnics, they attend the final match between two proud polo clubs. When the winning team’s captain is found murdered in the stables, everyone assumes the opposing team’s captain killed him. After all, he was found holding the murder weapon, and everyone knows they hated each other.

A wealthy businessman with a reputation for taking risks rose from the slums to the height of success. But success comes at a price, especially when it’s achieved at the expense of others.

With her sharpened magical senses, Sylvia recognizes invisible writing while cataloging an obscure book for the library. She’s shocked to discover the message, written many years earlier, pleaded for help. She’s even more shocked to discover the author of the message was married to a paper magician. Could there be a connection to Sylvia’s father? With a magical mystery on her hands, Sylvia engages the help of Gabe Glass, and together they follow the clues to the location of two hidden ledgers that implicate a very dangerous individual in an illegal bookmaking scheme.

December 1899. After the death of her beloved grandmother, Cleopatra Fox moves into the luxury hotel owned by her estranged uncle in the hopes of putting hardship and loneliness behind her. But the poisoning of a guest on Christmas eve throws her new life, and the hotel, into chaos. Cleo quickly realizes no one can be trusted, not Scotland Yard and especially not the hotel’s charming assistant manager.

This boxed set contains the first three books in C. J. Archer's popular Ministry of Curiosities series. Titles in the set include The Last Necromancer, Her Majesty's Necromancer, and Beyond the Grave. Description of The Last Necromancer: For five years, Charlotte (Charlie) Holloway has lived as a boy in the slums. But when one theft too many gets her arrested, her only means of escape lies with a dead man.

India and Matt thought all their problems would come to an end once they found Chronos. But the watch magician brings with him as many questions as answers, and a load of trouble. To fix Matt's magic watch, they must find an old diary that once belonged to a doctor magician murdered decades ago. The hunt drags them into a sordid mystery involving two of London's craft guilds. With old and new enemies determined to stop them, and long-held secrets unearthed, Matt and India must work together better than ever.

When Gavin travels to Edinburgh with his good friend Oscar Barratt, he’s eager to acquire a centuries-old book on witchcraft for the soon-to-open Glass Library. Even with ruthless railroad magnate John J. Defoe in the bidding, the victory comes easily. Perhaps too easily. Hours later, the book is stolen. A single clue links the theft to the recent abduction of two women, both magicians.

Hannah Smith thinks she’s safe now that Reuben Tate is set to face trial. But when an unusual creature is let loose on the Freak House estate, everybody is in danger, including Jack. To hunt it down, the household must take risks, but the greatest risk is to Hannah’s heart. She’s in danger of falling deeply in love with Jack, a man whose very touch can kill her.

India Steele is desperate. Her father is dead, her fiancé took her inheritance, and no one will employ her, despite years working for her watchmaker father. Indeed, the other London watchmakers seem frightened of her. Alone, poor, and at the end of her tether, India takes employment with the only person who’ll accept her–an enigmatic and mysterious man from America. A man who possesses a strange watch that rejuvenates him when he’s ill.

Time is running out for Hannah. With her life hanging by a thread and Tate trying to kidnap her, she finds help in an unusual quarter – the man who put the narcoleptic memory block on her as a child. Yet the powerful hypnotist may not be all that he seems. It’s difficult to trust a man who regularly hypnotizes his wife against her wishes, and who is much too interested in Jack’s unnatural abilities.

Librarian Sylvia Ashe knows nothing about her past, having grown up without a father and a mother who refused to discuss him. When she stumbles upon a diary that suggests she's descended from magicians, she's skeptical. After all, magicians are special, and she's just an ordinary woman who loves books. She seeks answers from a member of the most prominent family of magicians, but she quickly learns that finding the truth won't be easy, especially when he turns out to be as artless as her, and more compelling and dangerous than books.

Minerva Peabody needs a man. Unfortunately she picked the wrong one. The impoverished playwright has a dream to see her plays performed on stage, but in Elizabethan England, not only are women considered the inferior sex, they simply do not write plays. Faced with rejection after rejection, she decides to take one more chance with the most desperate theater manager in London, only this time she’ll use the cover of a man. Sucked in by a pair of bright blue eyes and impressive shoulders, she chooses Blake out of the crowd, never thinking he’ll actually play an active role in her ruse.

Cleo’s holiday with her family to the seaside resort town of Brighton is everything she hoped it would be…until she receives a blackmail note. The blackmailer demands Cleo help her or a story revealing Cleo’s investigating will appear in the newspaper. With her uncle warning her to keep her detecting activities private, Cleo agrees to meet the blackmailer when they return to London. But when the woman is seen getting on the train but not off, Cleo grows concerned.

When a notorious cad is bludgeoned to death with a candlestick in the library at the most important ball of the London social season, Cleo finds herself in the prime position to solve the crime. After all, she stumbled across the body soon after the victim’s demise and is a witness to the evening’s events.

December 1899. After the death of her beloved grandmother, Cleopatra Fox moves into the luxury hotel owned by her estranged uncle in the hopes of putting hardship and loneliness behind her. But the poisoning of a guest throws her new life, and the hotel, into chaos. Cleo quickly realizes no one can be trusted, not Scotland Yard and especially not the hotel’s charming assistant manager. With the New Year’s Eve ball approaching fast and the hotel’s reputation hanging by a thread, Cleo must find the killer before the ball, and the hotel itself, are ruined.

Are curses real? After a toymaker magician gives a lecture at a collector’s club soiree, an important spell is stolen and a man is found strangled. The investigation into his murder leads India and Matt to the colorful and dangerous world of the Romany gypsy where curses are used as weapons against their enemies. But nobody seems to know if curses are real or not. As Matt and India close in on the killer, old foes bring trouble into their lives. With the threat of exposure hanging over London’s magicians, disaster is never far away.

It’s customary for Gothic romance novels to include a mysterious girl locked in the attic. Hannah Smith just wishes she wasn’t that girl. As a narcoleptic and the companion to an earl’s daughter with a strange affliction of her own, Hannah knows she’s lucky to have a roof over her head and food in her belly when so many orphans starve on the streets. Yet freedom is something Hannah longs for. She did not, however, want her freedom to arrive in the form of kidnapping.

The weekend was supposed to be an enjoyable time with her family at the neo-Gothic manor of Lord and Lady Kershaw, but when the gamekeeper is murdered, Cleo can’t rest until the killer is caught. As a witness herself, she’s frustrated with the incompetence of the local police who lay the blame on a man who conveniently disappeared. When she realizes their ineptitude is a result of Lord Kershaw’s influence, she focuses her investigation on the earl and his family, against the wishes of her uncle.

With the social season just around the corner, the women in Cleo’s family are having new outfits made by the most sought-after designer in the city. Madame Poitiers is bold, self-absorbed, and not French, despite her claims. When Cleo stumbles on her dead body in the salon, she is in a unique position to gather clues and speak to witnesses. But she doesn’t expect to find Harry Armitage’s business card in Madame’s possession. What is the alluring private detective’s connection to the victim? And why is he avoiding Cleo?