Dianne Freeman •
A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder •

Frances Wynn, Countess of Harleigh, has just observed the requisite year of mourning for her husband, a philanderer who died in his mistress’s bed. Now she’s ready to throw off her widow’s weeds and escape her grasping in-laws. With money settled on her by a foresighted father, she secures the leasehold of a small house in London and prepares to make a new life for herself and seven-year-old daughter Rose.

Here’s Frances visiting the draper’s shop to buy material for Rose’s bed curtains. “Customers gathered in groups . . . waiting for the thump and swish, as a new bolt hit the table, and the fabric unwound to reveal its beauty. It was intoxicating.” Rose picks a pattern of horses riding to the hunt—definitely not to Frances’s taste. “Then I turned to Rose, her shoulders slumped, as she gazed with admiring eyes at the hunt scene. Her disappointment reminded me that I had never been allowed to choose anything for myself, not even my husband. She deserved a choice.”

As Amelia Peabody could tell her, the path to independence is strewn with pitfalls for Victorian ladies. First her scheming brother-in-law has Frances’s bank account frozen. Then a police detective wants to exhume her husband’s body to check for poison—with Frances as the principal suspect. Finally, when she attends a social function for the first time in months, a stolen sapphire bracelet is planted in her reticule.

“Do you remember when a ball meant nothing but fun for us?” sighs Frances. “Now we have to face our late husbands’ mistresses, our greedy relatives, and jewel thieves of all things. Rather takes the fun out of everything, doesn’t it?”

That may be true for Frances. But for Freeman’s lucky readers, the fun is just beginning with this sparkling series debut.