Good Day, book people. I hope everyone is having a good week so far. I’m incredibly happy to welcome today’s guest. Our guest today is not only taking time to step off the pages to visit with us but she’s also stepping a bit out-of-time. Fresh off the pages of Murder at the Marlowe Club by Kate Parker, I give you Miss Emily Gates. Thank you, Miss Gates, for taking the time to visit us today and provide us with some background information. I hope we won’t keep you too long from your job at Duquesne’s Millinery or your fine detecting work.
Hello, I’m Emily Gates. Kate Parker is making a study of murder cases where I’ve been instrumental in bringing killers to justice. So far she’s written two books about me, The Killing at Kaldaire House and Murder at the Marlowe Club. To give her credit, I think Kate has done a good job of reporting on my adventures.
I should introduce myself. I’m a milliner, designing and making hats at Duquesne’s Millinery. The firm was started by my mother and her cousin, Noah. My childhood memories revolve around countless hours of practice making ribbon flowers and dyeing feathers, cutting felt, and blocking forms. It’s a good thing that I spent so much time learning the business, since a fever that crossed London when I was eighteen killed my mother and struck my little brother deaf at the age of eight.
My father? You want to know about him? Why? We don’t get along. He was no help when my mother was alive nor when she died, and he’s been no help since. My mother warned me that he was useless, that he was a crook, that his entire family were criminals, and I should have nothing to do with any of them.
I agreed with her about my father, but I’ve always had a soft spot for my grandfather. I’m his only granddaughter amid more than a dozen grandsons, and he’s always treated me as his favorite. Despite the division of boys’ activities and girls’ activities during the reign of the old queen that have continued into the new century, Grandpa always included me in his lessons. I learned to pick locks, find hidden compartments, pickpockets, do sleight of hand, and even perform some elementary safecracking along with my cousins.
Once my mother died, I was so busy keeping the business running and raising my brother that I didn’t have time to see my father’s family. My father didn’t come to see my mother when she was dying, so I have had no desire to see him since.
Five or six years passed before I could raise my head to look around. The business was thriving, as much as any business could that depended on aristocrats. Unlike normal people, many aristocrats pay their bills rarely, if at all. It has to do with the sale of crops from their estates, which is fine for them, but not so much for tradespeople who like the prestige of aristocratic clients but not their slowness in paying bills.
Matthew, my little brother who is deaf, had outgrown the local schools, and I wanted to send him to a prestigious boarding school for deaf students. That would require every penny I could spare, which meant I would have to find a way to urge my aristocratic clients to pay me first. I decided I would have to use some of the skills I learned from my father’s family to get them to pay up. The second time I tried an unconventional bill collection method, I met Lady Kaldaire and became involved in my first murder investigation.
Somehow, we survived that adventure, but when a friend of Lady Kaldaire started losing family members, she decided I was the best choice to find their killer. And so we began the adventure called Murder at the Marlowe Club.
Kate Parker enjoys her travels into the heart of Edwardian London with Emily Gates. Their current story is Murder at the Marlowe Club.
Murder at the Marlowe Club (The Milliner Mysteries)
by Kate Parker
About Murder at the Marlowe Club
Historical Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Publisher: JDP Press (February 24, 2020)
Print Length: 209 pages
Digital ASIN: B083M97VWP
Purchase Links – Amazon – B&N – Apple –Kobo
A corpse in a corset. A dangerous gambling den. A perilous path between safety and peril.
London, 1905. Leading milliner Emily Gates’ illegal shortcut through a private park in the rain brought her straight to a scantily clothed corpse. Then her route took her straight into the hands of the indefatigable Lady Kaldaire, who recognized the body as a relative of her longtime friend, the Duchess of Wallingford. Lady Kaldaire blackmailed Emily before to find Lord Kaldaire’s killer. Why not this murderer, too?
Emily has plenty of reasons why not, but finding links between her father’s nefarious family of crooks and conmen and the debauchery of the secretive Marlowe Club involves her in the investigation led by the handsome Inspector Russell of Scotland Yard. Emily discovers more than she expects about the licentious world of the corpse through her aristocratic customers, including Georgia, heroine of the Victorian Bookshop Mysteries, now the Duchess of Blackford.
Are the scandal rags correct, or has the victim been maligned by a mastermind who’ll stop at nothing to gain everything?
This is a historical cozy mystery with no graphic violence, sex, or foul language. Just exciting action, mysterious events, and surprising endings.
Kate Parker grew up reading her mother’s collection of mystery books and her father’s library of history and biography books. Now she can’t write a story that isn’t set in the past with a few decent corpses littered about.
Author Links
Website – www.KateParkerbooks.com, Facebook – www.facebook.com/Author.Kate.Parker, BookBub – www.bookbub.com/authors/kate-parker
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Author: thebookdivasreads
I'm a reader, an avid reader, or perhaps a rabid reader (at least according to my family). I enjoy reading from a variety of different genres but particularly enjoy fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, ChickLit, romance and classics. I also enjoy reading about numerous non-fiction subjects including aromatherapy, comparative religions, herbalism, naturopathic medicine, and tea.
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The Book Diva's Reads 
Thank you for sharing more about Emily's background today! I really enjoyed reading the book, so learning more about Emily is great.
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I love reading historical mysteries. Sounds like a book I would love to read.
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This sounds like a book I will enjoy!
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