A journalist in nineteenth-century New York matches wits with a serial killer in a gripping thriller by the prizewinning author of the Ian Hamilton Mysteries. New York, 1880. Elizabeth van den Broek is the only female reporter at the Herald, the city's most popular newspaper. Then she and her bohemian friend Carlotta Ackerman find a woman's body wrapped like a mummy in a freshly dug hole in Central Park-the intended site of an obelisk called Cleopatra's Needle. The macabre discovery takes Elizabeth away from the society pages to follow an investigation into New York City's darkest shadows. When more bodies turn up, each tied to Egyptian lore, Elizabeth is onto a headline-making scoop more sinister than she could have imagined. Her reporting has readers spellbound, and each new clue implicates New York's richest and most powerful citizens. And a serial killer is watching every headline. Now a madman with an indecipherable motive is coming after Elizabeth and everyone she loves. She wants a good story? She may have to die to get it.

Superstition and murder haunt nineteenth-century Scotland in a twisting mystery by the prize-winning author of Edinburgh Twilight and Edinburgh Dusk. Spiritualism has captured the public’s imagination. Séances are all the rage, and Detective Ian Hamilton’s otherwise sensible aunt Lillian is not immune to their allure. But for Ian, indulging her superstitions has its limits. When members of Lillian’s circle of séance friends begin turning up dead, Ian doesn’t need a medium to tell him these aren’t freak accidents. With the help of his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian investigates, and he is soon drawn into a dark world of believers and tricksters, and a puzzling series of murders with no pattern, no motive, and no end in sight. Most alarming, the crimes conjure up the ghosts of Ian’s own past, including the mysterious deaths of his parents, which have haunted him for years. As two cases converge, science collides with the uncanny, and Ian must confront truths that are more disturbing than he could ever have imagined.

The prize-winning author of Edinburgh Twilight returns to the darkening shadows of nineteenth-century Scotland to track a killer on a profane mission of revenge. A wicked Scottish winter has just begun when pioneering female physician Sophia Jex-Blake calls on Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton to investigate the suspicious death of one of her patients-a railroad lineman who she believes succumbed to the horrific effects of arsenic poisoning. The most provocative aspect of the case doesn't escape Hamilton: the married victim's numerous sexual transgressions. Now, for the first time since the unexplained fire that killed his parents, Hamilton enters the Royal Infirmary to gain the insights of brilliant medical student Arthur Conan Doyle. Then a second poisoning occurs-this time, a prominent banker who died in the bed of a prostitute. It appears that someone is making Edinburgh's more promiscuous citizens pay for their sins. As the body count rises and public panic takes hold, Hamilton and Doyle delve into the seedy underbelly of the city, where nothing is as it seems, no one is immune to murder, and even trusted friends can be enemies in disguise.