The Frances Doughty Mysteries are a series of whodunits set in Victorian Bayswater featuring a young female sleuth.
Frances, born in 1860 is the daughter of William Doughty who runs a chemists shop on Westbourne Grove. He was hoping that her older brother Frederick would follow in his footsteps, but Frederick suffered an accident and lingered for two years before he died in 1879. Frances wanted to study as a pharmacist but was obliged to give up that ambition to first nurse her dying brother and then care for her father whose health had been shattered as a result of his loss.
The first book in the Frances Doughty series begins in January 1880 soon after Frederick’s death, and Frances is working in the chemists shop, looking after her ailing father and managing the household assisted by the loyal maid of all work, Sarah. When Percival Garton, a wealthy customer of the shop dies of strychnine poisoning after drinking medicine dispensed at the shop, the rumour flies around Bayswater that William Doughty made a mistake, and the business starts to collapse.
Frances is sure that the medicine was poisoned after it left the shop and decides to turn detective. She makes some curious new friends, and uncovers crimes, scandals and mysteries buried in the past. On her personal journey she gains confidence, confronts tragedy and disaster and is shocked by revelations about her own family.
This is only the start of Frances’ story, and following the events in this book her life will never be the same again.
Frances, with her new notoriety as a lady detective, is asked to investigate an unexplained, although not criminal incident at a highly respectable girls’ school. Before long she is faced with two murders, a mysterious death, blackmail and bigamy. As election fever hits Bayswater, the ladies of the Bayswater Women’s Suffrage Society go on the march, an enraged poet extracts a cruel revenge, some very unsavoury secrets emerge, and Frances makes a powerful new friend.
Dr Mackenzie’s Lifehouse on the edge of Kensal Green Cemetery is a very unusual mortuary. Designed to reassure its patrons that they need never fear being buried alive, it stores corpses until they begin to decompose and are undeniably beyond revival. One night, with Bayswater blanketed in a choking fog, Mackenzie dies and his assistant vanishes. In the world of the Victorian dead, decay, burial, exhumations and post mortems will follow, and Frances' investigations will take her deep into the catacombs.
Linda Stratmann