The Quill & Page Victorian Mysteries & The Samuel Pepys Mysteries

Book 1

The Brampton Witch Murders

Can Samuel Pepys save his sister from the hangman’s noose?

The famous diarist sends his new inquisitors, Abby Harcourt and Jacob Standish, to Brampton to investigate sinister witchcraft allegations.

Can they prove Paulina’s innocence before the witchfinder, Simon Hopkins – son of the Witchfinder General himself, Matthew Hopkins – sends her to the gallows?

Book 3

The Coffee House Murders

In London, 1666, drinking coffee can get you killed…

The case of Samuel Pepys’s missing pocket watch escalates rapidly when Eustace Blount, satirist and wit, is found murdered in Rose’s Coffee House on The Strand.

When Abby and Jacob follow the clues to the neighbouring Gilded Bean coffee house, frequented by Members of Parliament loyal to the King, they become trapped inside a deadly political game.

Book 5

The Frost Fair Murders

When the Thames freezes over, Death shall stalk the ice.

St Stephen’s Day, 1666. Londoners, still reeling from the Great Fire, spill onto the frozen river for the Frost Fair: a glittering wonderland of puppet shows and skating, taverns and trinkets, gambling booths and gingerbread.

But beneath the revelry something more chilling lurks.

Book 7

The Brampton Ghost Murders

They dug for Pepys’s gold – and unearthed the dead.

The Wychwood Drummer – the ghost of a man hanged for theft – beats his lonely tattoo among the trees at night, and villagers swear he guards the stolen gold.

Stranded in a derelict cottage deep in Wychwood, with the drumbeat echoing through the forest, Abby and Jacob must solve their deadliest case. For Brampton hasn’t forgotten.

And now the noose swings for them.

Ellis Blackwood

I’ve always loved a mystery. Growing up in England I read every Hardy Boys and Three Investigators book I could find. Later came Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh – I reread Tied Up in Tinsel every Christmas for so many years, I knew whodunit before I’d opened the book. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse. And Columbo. I really love Columbo.

I’m a writer by trade. So at some point the question became inevitable: why don’t I write one myself?

The Quill & Page Victorian Mysteries came first as an idea. Invert the usual upper classes investigating dreadful oiks trope.  Kate Quill and Frederick Page are distinctly below-stairs, solving crimes their social betters would rather keep quiet, on the gaslit streets of 1880s London. They arrived more or less fully formed. The gloriously chaotic found family around them followed shortly after.

But before Kate and Frederick, there was Samuel Pepys.

Read Pepys’s diaries and you enter actual 17th century London. You’re there among the grandeur and the grime, seeing and smelling what Pepys experienced. Hooked, I fell down a rabbit hole of plague years, Great Fires, Civil Wars and Restoration intrigue, and eventually emerged with nine Samuel Pepys Mysteries and a burning desire to write about the Victorians.

Two series. Ten books and counting. More than one million KU pages reads.