A Secret Never Told (A Lady Dunbridge Mystery) by Shelley Noble | Character Guest Post

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Miss Fisher meets Downton Abbey in A Secret Never Told, the fourth installment in the critically acclaimed mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Shelley Noble.

A Secret Never Told (A Lady Dunbridge Mystery)

by Shelley Noble

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A Secret Never Told (A Lady Dunbridge Mystery)
Historical Cozy Mystery
4th in Series
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Forge Books; 1st edition (November 23, 2021)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages

Philomena Amesbury, expatriate Countess of Dunbridge, is bored. Coney Island in the sweltering summer of 1908 offers no shortage of diversions for a young woman of means, but sea bathing, horse racing, and even amusement parks can’t hold a candle to uncovering dastardly plots and chasing villains. Lady Dunbridge hadn’t had a big challenge in months.

Fate obliges when Phil is called upon to host a dinner party in honor of a visiting Austrian psychologist whose revolutionary theories may be of interest to the War Department, not to mention various foreign powers, and who may have already survived one attempt on his life. The guest list includes a wealthy industrialist, various rival scientists and academics, a party hypnotist, a flamboyant party-crasher, and a damaged beauty whose cloudy psyche is lost in a world of its own. Before the night is out, one of the guests is dead with a bullet between the eyes and Phil finds herself with another mystery on her hands, even if it’s unclear who exactly the intended victim was meant to be.

Worse yet, the police’s prime suspect is a mystery man who Phil happens to be rather intimately acquainted with. Now it’s up to Lady Dunbridge, with the invaluable assistance of her intrepid butler and lady’s maid, to find the real culprit before the police nab the wrong one . . .

Character guest post: Philomena Amesbury, Lady Dunbridge

My Dears,

Some of you may be wondering how a young, dare I say, beautiful Dowager Countess finds herself in 1908 Manhattan?

With the untimely, but I must confess appreciated, death of my dissolute spouse, I was doomed to a life of quiet in a crumbling dower house with a suitably dull female companion. So I was forced to do what any self respecting countess would do in the same situation. I created a scandal, thwarted my family and booked passage on the SS Oceanic.

Fortunately, my faithful butler, Preswick, instead of taking his much deserved pension and retiring, insisted on making the voyage to the New World to see to my every need…and to keep me on the straight and narrow and out of trouble. Poor man, he was doomed to disappointment. I’m afraid instead, I’ve quite led him astray.

Not in the way you might think, but into murder—not committing it but into solving the mystery of who did and bringing the culprit to justice.

But little did I suspect that behind his stoic facade, and his seventy some odd years, Preswick has a keen interest in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that amazing creation of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Preswick, in addition to being the consummate butler, is also a talented investigator and his ability to keep silver polished to a sheen is surpassed by his detectival acumen.

Add to that, the talants of my enigmatic lady’s maid, a girl we literally snatched from the arms of English custom officials for attempting to stowaway on the ship. And whose name to this day, we haven’t learned. We call her Lily because of her almost perfect skin.

The three of us manage to stay one step ahead of the alarmingly debonair, utterably annoying Detective Sergeant John Atkins, who runs things by the book even when the book is wrong.

Though it is true, I gladly accept the aid of the good policemen’s nemesis, a shadowy figure of a man—and what a man he is — I call Mr. X for lack of a better soubriquet.

It does occur to me that there are quite a few unanswered questions about an inordinate number of my confederates.

But one thing I am certain of, if there is a murder to be solved in Gilded Age Manhattan, Lady Dunbridge is happy to oblige.

About Shelley Noble

Shelley Noble is the author of the Lady Dunbridge Gilded Age mysteries beginning with ASK ME NO QUESTIONS, and The Newport Gilded Age mysteries. As Shelley Freydont she has written several amateur sleuth series.

She is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nine novels of women’s fiction. WHISPER BEACH and BEACH COLORS, were Amazon and Nook bestsellers. The latest, LUCKY’S BEACH, was published in June 2020.

A former professional dancer and choreographer, Shelley lives at the Jersey shore where she indulges her passion for lighthouses and vintage carousels.

Author Links

Website – https://www.shelleynoble.com

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/ShelleyNobleAuthor/

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/shelleynobleauthor/

GoodReads – https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5560617.Shelley_Noble

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