When Cassie Pengear agreed to spend the evening with her cousin Milly, and Milly's latest gentleman caller and his mother, it was with the promise that Milly and her gentleman would not trouble her again unless there was an impending marriage. She did not expect Milly to stumble over a body in her prospective mother-in-law's box room, and she certainly did not expect Inspector Wainwright to draw the case. Now Milly is convinced they're all suspects and Cassie is the only one who can figure out who murdered the body in the box room.

In a Victorian England that almost existed, a steampunk London where tinkerers and clockwork devices exist alongside hansom cabs and corsets, murder is still solved by traditional observation and intuition. This is the London where American typist Cassandra Pengear finds herself stumbling over corpses and helping Scotland Yard detectives solve murders (although they inexplicably prefer to call it interfering). Follow her adventures in the Cassie Pengear Mystery series, beginning with The Killing at the Carnival.