CHAPTER ONE On or about the first day of October 1855, the city of London, England, decided it was time once and for all that Charles Lenox be married. Lenox himself didn’t even necessarily disagree. He lived a happy life as a bachelor in the passage through Mayfair known as Hamp- den Lane, but for…
The Woman in the Water by Charles Finch is a prequel to the Charles Lenox series, which takes readers back to Lenox's very first case and the ruthless serial killer who would set him on the course to become one of London’s most brilliant detectives (available February 20, 2018). London, 1850: A young Charles Lenox…
The year I turned either eleven or twelve I received a massive and distinguished hardcover edition of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories. It seemed like literally the worst present anyone had ever received: terrible, but also not cheap, and therefore tragic. That money could have been turned into perfectly good baseball cards. I was a…
Often, the most tumultuous part of the publishing process is the creation of cover art. Responsible for hundreds of books a year, artists work tirelessly to create the perfect image to represent 300+ pages, and publishers, editors, sales reps, and marketers all weigh in with opinions that the artist has to absorb and consider. Tough!…
The Inheritance by Charles Finch is the 10th book in the Charles Lenox series (Available November 1, 2016). Charles Lenox has received a cryptic plea for help from an old Harrow schoolmate, Gerald Leigh, but when he looks into the matter he finds that his friend has suddenly disappeared. As boys they had shared a…
Home by Nightfall by Charles Finch is the 9th Victorian mystery featuring gentleman sleuth Charles Lenox (available November 10, 2015). A death in the family brings gentleman sleuth Charles Lenox back to the country house where he grew up—just in time to confront an odd, unsettling crime in a nearby village. It’s London in 1876,…
The golden age of the fictional villain—twirling his moustache, laughing Frenchly, tying women to train tracks—was the 19th century. In that innocent age, you could actually spook readers with a one-dimensional madman; you didn’t have to bother much with a motivation (unless it was money). But then the modern era came along and started producing…
Either money or madness is set at the center of nearly every mystery novel—and of course money itself can be a kind of madness. The Victorians knew as much. Think of the eponymous miser of Silas Marner by George Eliot, the insanities that cluster around Wilkie Collins’s moonstone, or the crazed but calculating greed of…
There is a law—a real, actual law—that existed in England until 1823: if a court adjudged a man to have committed suicide, his corpse had to be buried at a crossroads, with a stake through its heart. His family was forbidden to mourn. When the British Parliament finally concluded that this practice was not so…
In a lively market town in Warwickshire during the 1570’s, a leather merchant and glovemaker, formerly very prosperous, was edging toward financial ruin. The courts prosecuted him–or perhaps only threatened to–for illegally trading in large quantities of wool and for usury, money-lending. By 1576 he had to forfeit his public office. There is almost no…
