Bücher von Lynn Messina

Verity Lark, Unraveling Deception.Verity Lark - England's most tenacious gossip, the London Daily Gazette's most dogged reporter - relishes a challenge, which is why she refuses Colson Hardwicke's offer of menial employment. If the infuriating scoundrel really needs the sister of a radical reformer to be distracted with girlish chitchat, he can bloody well erupt into giggles!She has more important things to do - figuring out why Hardwicke is interested in the radical reformer. During her previous run-in with him, he had shown himself to be the superior tactician, and she is determined to even the score. Proving that the radical reformer is an escaped fugitive is one way. Saving the country from a Luddite insurrection is another.But when Verity stumbles across a dead man in a rundown boarding house, the competition suddenly stops being a game. There is more going on than she had ever imagined, and as she struggles to untangle Hardwicke's web of machinations, she is forced to wonder if she has been a pawn all along.Welcome to the second installment of the Verity Lark Mysteries, where secrets run deep, and every move could be her last.

Finally, Flora Hyde-Clare has wrest the narrative from Beatrice by finding her own compelling murder mystery to solve.Well, it's not entirely her own because the victim is her cousin's former beau, Mr. Theodore Davies, whose father cruelly separated the young lovers (though not socruelly, for it left the door open for Bea to woo the Duke of Kesgrave). Bea insists, of course, that the law clerk's death was merely an accident.If only he had not been in the path of that wretched carriage!Oh, but Flora knows that evasive look on her cousin's face.Bea is hiding something. Clearly, Davies had gotten himself entangled in some nefarious business, and Flora is determined to discover the truth despite the danger it puts her in.Or is that because it puts her in danger? After all, any heroine worth her salt must be willing to take on a great deal of personal risk. And Flora has her mind set on being a heroine of the highest order.

Having solved the two murders that somehow fell in her path, Beatrice Hyde-Clare is on the lookout for a third. Through an absurd quirk of stupid fate, the shy spinster has fallen in love with the thoroughly unattainable Duke of Kesgrave and is desperate for something, anything, to occupy her mind. A dead body would do nicely.Fortunately for her, a fellow guest from a Lake District house party appears on her doorstep with exactly that: the lover of his fiancée's mother expired after a wretchedly painful episode just that morning in an apparent poisoning.As unorthodox as it is, he would like Bea to investigate rather than calling the authorities. Bea begins her inquiry into Mr. Wilson's death at once and almost immediately finds herself in the company of Kesgrave, who is as determined as ever to assist her.'Twas patently unfair, for the whole point of the investigation was to get away from the handsome lord. Now Bea is faced with the daunting challenge of exposing the villain without revealing her heart.

Having inexplicably nabbed the Duke of Kesgrave, twenty-six-year-old spinster Beatrice Hyde-Clare is determined to marry him at once.And no amount of handwringing from anxious family members, worried friends and well-meaning acquaintances will convince her to delay. Except...maybe she is a littleswayed by her uncle's efforts to make amends for treating her with cold indifference during her childhood. While her aunt's concern about the growing scandal around her unfortunate habit of unmasking murderers in the middle of society events isn't entirely unfounded.Then there's the truly unfathomable appearance on her doorstep of the former Miss Brougham, the spiteful heiress whose cruel taunts derailed Bea's social career. Remarkably, the society matron has a mystery to solve and knows Bea is the only person who can help her. A dead grandfather, a missing jewel, a cryptic letter, an opportunity to condescend to her archnemesis-the case seems simple enough.And yet somehow it all goes terribly, horribly wrong.

As much as Beatrice Hyde-Clare relished the challenge of figuring out who murdered a fellow guest during a house party in the Lake District, she certainly does not consider herself an amateur investigator.So when a London dandy falls dead at her feet in the entryway of a London Daily Gazette, she feels no compulsion to investigate. It was a newspaper office, after all, and reporters are already on the case as are the authorities. She has her own problems to deal with anyway-such as extricating herself from a seemingly harmless little fib that has somehow grown in into a ridiculously large fiction.Truly, she has no interest at all. Except the dagger that killed the poor earl seemed disconcertingly familiar...And so Bea is off to the British Museum because she cannot rest until she confirms her suspicion, while trying to allay her family's concerns and comprehend the Duke of Kesgrave's compulsion.For the handsome lord has no reason to waste his time solving a mystery alongside a shy spinster. And yet he turns up everywhere she goes.

Having long abandoned any hope of making a match, twenty-six-year-old Beatrice Hyde-Clare finds herself a little overwhelmed by her engagement to the Duke of Kesgrave.Cloying society matrons clamor for her attention while her aunt reels off an endless list of servants she will have to oversee. Even the most intrepid female would quake at the prospect of managing eight footmen!Fortunately, Bea knows the perfect distraction-an intriguing mystery-and pays a call on the Countess of Abercrombie, who had promised her that very thing only the evening before.But her ladyship is reluctant to discuss the details with a newly minted duchess-to-be, and it dawns on Bea that the investigation cuts closer to home than she could have ever imagined. Because this time the murder victims are her own mother and father, who had died twenty years before in a seemingly straightforward boating accident.Alas, nothing is straightforward, and as Bea digs into her past, she discovers with growing horror that she has no more idea how to be a daughter than she does a duchess.

Lange Zeit galt Beatrice Hyde-Clare als schwer vermittelbares Mauerblümchen auf dem Heiratsmarkt der High Society. Doch dann stolperte die aufgeweckte junge Frau über ihre erste Leiche und entdeckte ihr Talent als scharfsinnige Detektivin - an der Seite des attraktiven und absolut nervtötenden Dukes of Kesgrave, der ihr stets auf wundersame Weise bei ihren Ermittlungen in die Quere kam.Als dieser begehrteste Junggeselle Londons Beatrice überraschend einen Heiratsantrag macht, steht die Welt Kopf - nicht nur für die zukünftige Duchess, die sich mit einem Mal nicht mehr vor Einladungen in exklusive Tee-Salons retten kann, sondern auch für ihre Tante Vera, die sofort anfängt, ihren Hausstand zu planen. Das ist selbst für eine unerschrockene Hobby-Detektivin zu viel, und Beatrice flüchtet sich in den Salon ihrer Vertrauten, der Countess von Abercrombie.Lady Abercrombie hat ihr vor kurzem einen neuen Fall in Aussicht gestellt - ein mysteriöser Todesfall, der offenbar schon viele Jahre zurückliegt. Doch nun gibt sich die ältere Dame plötzlich zögerlich. Es dauert eine Weile, bis Beatrice begreift, dass es in dem neuen Fall um ihre eigenen Eltern geht, die bei einem tragischen Bootsunfall ums Leben kamen, als sie ein Kind war. War es ein Unfall? Als Beatrice beginnt, in der Vergangenheit zu graben, erkennt sie mit zunehmendem Entsetzen, dass nichts in ihrer Familie so ist, wie es scheint ...

Ende der Langeweile einer idyllischen Landpartie. Als Beatrice Hyde-Clare kurz nach Mitternacht in der Bibliothek von Lakeview Hall über die Leiche eines Gastes stolpert, ist es mit ihren hehren Vorsätzen weiblicher Zurückhaltung vorbei. Offiziell wird als Todesursache Freitod angegeben, Beatrice aber weiß es besser. Schließlich hat sie den eingeschlagenen Schädel des unglückseligen Mr. Otley gesehen. Ebenso wie der provozierend arrogante Duke of Kesgrave, der seltsamerweise alles daransetzt, den brutalen Mord als Selbstmord erscheinen zu lassen ...

Seventeen-year-old Chrissy Gibbons has landed her dream job?a summer internship at her favorite magazine, Savvy. Being an intern is hard work, but the job becomes a lot more fun when Chrissy is befriended by a glamorous fashion editor who takes her to all the best parties. As the summer winds down, though, Chrissy realizes that in the whirlwind of parties and boys, she's been neglecting what could be her big break in the magazine business: an opportunity to compete against other interns to become Savvy's first teen columnist. Chrissy struggles to come up with a winning subject for her column?and in the process, she discovers what is most important to her.

You know Darcy: rich, proud, standoffish, disapproving, one of the greatest romantic heroes of all time. But you don't know this Darcy because this Darcy is a woman.In Prejudice & Pride, Lynn Messina’s modern retelling with a gender-bendy twist, everything is vaguely familiar and yet wholly new. Bingley is here, in the form of Charlotte "Bingley" Bingston, an heiress staying at the Netherfield hotel on Central Park, as is Longbourn, transformed from an ancestral home into a perennially cash-strapped art museum on the edge of the city. Naturally, it employs an audacious fundraiser with an amused glint in his eye called Bennet. All the favorite characters are present and cleverly updated: Providing the cringe-worthy bon mots is Mr. Meryton, the nerve-wracked executive director of the Longbourn who’s always on the lookout for heiresses to join his museum’s very important committees. (Universally acknowledged truth: Any woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a social committee to chair.) Collin Parsons is still in obsequious, if ironic, awe of his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The wicked Georgia Wickham toils as a graphic designer at Redcoat Design by day and schemes against Darcy by night. With her trademark wit and style, Lynn Messina takes the genres she does best—chick lit, mashups, and Regency romance—and weaves them into one delightfully entertaining tale that doubles as a fun guessing game.