Bloody Lessons

In Bloody Lessons, it’s the winter of 1880, and the teachers of San Francisco are under attack: their salaries slashed and their competency and morals questioned in a series of poison pen letters.

Annie Fuller, the reluctant clairvoyant, has been called into investigate by Nate Dawson, her lawyer beau, and the case becomes personal when they discover that Laura, Nate’s sister, may be one of the teachers targeted for attack.

In this installment in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, readers will find the same blend of a cozy mystery with romantic suspense, played out against the historical backdrop of late 19th century San Francisco, that they found in Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits.

If you are new to this series, you will still enjoy spending time with the lively residents of Annie Fuller’s boarding house and visiting San Francisco when Golden Gate Park was filled with horse-drawn carriages, saloon-keepers controlled politics, and kisses were stolen under gaslight.

Maids of Misfortune is free on Amazon Kindle.

My Review

Bloody Lessons is the 3rd book in the A Victorian San Francisco Mystery series but the first I’ve read. I didn’t feel lost, though I would recommend reading the other two first since you hear a little bit about what happened in the previous book. It’s not really a spoiler though, so you’d be safe jumping in right here! I really enjoyed this book. I love cozy mysteries and ones set in the Victorian era are so much fun to read. I’m an old-fashioned girl at heart.

The setting of Victorian San Francisco is so intriguing to me. Though I am so grateful to be living in modern times with modern conveniences and medicines, I can’t help but be curious about what it would have been like to live back then. The architecture of the time was so beautiful, and Annie’s boarding house leaves me quite jealous! The descriptions of all of the beautiful Victorian homes and buildings, the hansom cabs, and the San Francisco Bay really made me feel like I was taken back in time.

The plot of Bloody Lessons sometimes split into other subplots. These all centered around the same people who live in Annie’s boarding house. It was definitely suspenseful though I did have an idea about “who-done-it.” I did change my mind about it a couple of times. There are twists and turns in the story that keep you guessing. The whole story is very good. It is truly a cozy mystery in every sense.

I love the characters in Bloody Lessons. Annie is my favorite. She runs the boarding house, is a fake psychic (since most people won’t take her advice as Annie!), and is just an all around wonderful person. The secondary characters are really fun and all well-developed. I can’t wait to see how the romantic involvements in this book play out in the following books.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys cozy mysteries or Victorian age mysteries.

M. Louisa Locke

I was a professor of history for over 30 years. I am retired, and I write full time. My first book, Maids of Misfortune, was actually written over twenty years ago. It’s based in part on my dissertation research on women who worked in the Far West at the end of the Nineteenth Century. However, a full time career of teaching and an active family life left me little time to do what was necessary to achieve success in traditional publishing.

When I cut back on my teaching several years ago, I began to investigate the new opportunities in ebooks and independent publishing. I decided from my research to self-publish Maids of Misfortune. For anyone interested, my blog details the reasons for that decision, and the ups and downs of being an indie author.

Website

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