INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER AND INDIE BESTSELLER! From the New York Times bestselling
author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie -a thrilling story of the five greatest women writers of
the Golden Age of Mystery and their bid to solve a real-life murder. London 1930. The five
greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal:
to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male
counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers the
group includes Agatha Christie Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They
call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder that of a young woman
found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of
the British establishment. May Daniels a young English nurse on an excursion to France with
her friend seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later
her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room
mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of
a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If as the police believe the cause of death
is manual strangulation why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene?
What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour?
Determined to solve the highly publicized murder the Queens of Crime embark on their own
investigation discovering they're stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy
Sayers herself threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to
keep hidden. Inspired by a true story in Sayers' own life New York Times bestselling author
Marie Benedict brings to life the lengths to which five talented women writers will go to be
taken seriously in the male-dominated world of letters as they unpuzzle a mystery torn from the
pages of their own novels.
