"Rona Parish's latest assignment, a series of articles on the town of Buckford, is almost complete when a young woman named Zara Crane approaches her with a request to help her trace her natural parents. Rona's curiosity is aroused not least because she discovers that Zara's birth mother had been murdered in her bath twenty-five years earlier." -- Jacket.

""Academia (n.): a profession filled with bad food, knee-jerk liberalism, and murder... Being a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Marthas College in Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone busy, but Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination of weddings, work, and spookery deprives her of five of her closest allies, she leaps at an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor on an American campus....

Promoting themselves from genteel poverty to fame, two beautiful sisters, one a daring fashion designer and the other a writer of scandalous novels, become each other's most staunch supporter and harshest critic in the face of misunderstandings and confidences.

The storyline of Miss Buncle's Book is a simple one: Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income.

Nothing Goes Unnoticed in the Small Town of Wandlebury! Much as changed in Wandlebury since Barbara Buncle (now Barbara Abbott) first moved to the charming English village. But as the mistress of her own home with two small children to look after, Barbara finds that she has distressingly little time to keep up with the goings-on of her friends and neighbors. Luckily, Barbara's niece, Jerry Abbott, is more than willing to keep tabs on the news in Wandlebury....

Biographer Rona Parish has a new project, contributing a series for the local glossy magazine, Chiltern Life, documenting life changing experiences from those who have lived through them. When her father suggests she speaks to his friend Frank Hathaway, who was in Iraq during the invasion of Kuwait, Rona decides to pay him a visit. But Frank was also badly injured in a failed rescue attempt following a car crash the previous year, and has been tormented...

Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.

Upon learning that she has been falsely accused of plagiarism, the normally mild-mannered Charlotte Brontë sets off for London to clear her name. But when she unintentionally witnesses a murder, Charlotte finds herself embroiled in a dangerous chain of events that forces her to confront demons from her past.--From publisher description.

"In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor's A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world. Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever. England, 1835. London is...

After the death of her siblings, Charlotte has few people she can trust, and feels more alone than ever. While visiting London, Charlotte goes on a tour of Bedlam, where she is sure she recognizes a struggling Mr. Slade, her long-missing ex-lover, strapped to one of the stretchers. Of course, she starts digging, and soon finds herself trying to reveal a secret that high-powered men would, and do, kill to protect.