Here are 92 books that The Women of Baker Street fans have personally recommended if you like
The Women of Baker Street.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am Julia Buckley. I am an avid reader and writer of mysteries. This particular subgenre of mystery focuses on schools and academic settings. I love institutions of learning as settings for mysteries because the buildings can be spooky and oppressive, but also because the dialogue is always intelligent. There is great potential for conflict between students, faculty, and campus interlopers. All of it is intriguing, and it allows for a closed world with limited suspects! If you haven’t read an academic mystery, give it a try! It’s like going back to school, but as a detective.
All of the Peter Wimsey novels are delightful, but I greatly enjoy the ones that feature Peter’s love interest, Harriet Vane.
In this one, Harriet, recently exonerated of a murder charge, returns to her Alma Mater, Oxford, for a traditional Gaudy dinner. Naturally, the event leads to murder, and Peter must be consulted to help resolve the case.
The twelfth book in Dorothy L Sayers' classic Lord Peter Wimsey series, introduced by actress Dame Harriet Mary Walter, DBE - a must-read for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries.
'D. L. Sayers is one of the best detective story writers' Daily Telegraph
Harriet Vane has never dared to return to her old Oxford college. Now, despite her scandalous life, she has been summoned back . . .
At first she thinks her worst fears have been fulfilled, as she encounters obscene graffiti, poison pen letters and a disgusting effigy when she arrives at sedate Shrewsbury…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am the author of the Sherlockiana duology My Dear Watson and Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories. I chose these books because they all have British women at the helm, involve detectives and/or investigative processes, and contain close-to-home scandals and intrigue. In that sense, these are “domestic” mysteries—books that contain puzzles related to everyday household drama. Miss Marple, Harriet Vane, and the women of Baker Street solve literal detective cases. The secret writings of Anne Lister and Constance Wilde show how they decoded the homosexual element in their lives, and used their writing to maintain a sense of self in oppressive societies. Each of them are women after my own heart.
Born Constance Lloyd and buried as Constance Holland, she is most widely known as Constance Wilde, wife of playwright and martyr Oscar Wilde.
For all that is written about Oscar and the trouble he found exploring his homosexuality in the 1890s, this fresh perspective on the obscured wife is invaluable. A daughter, sister, and mother, Constance was also an author, an activist, and (as suits the one name she never changed) a faithful friend.
Drawing on hundreds of unpublished letters, this book demystifies a woman overshadowed. Know the important work she did to free women of the confines and fatal dangers of the previous century’s dresses. Feel the heartbreak of a ruinous marriage—the man who betrayed her, and the children she couldn’t protect. Remember Constance, because she mattered too.
In the spring of 1895 the life of Constance Wilde changed irrevocably. Up until the conviction of her husband, Oscar, for homosexual crimes, she had held a privileged position in society. Part of a gilded couple, she was a popular children's author, a fashion icon, and a leading campaigner for women's rights. A founding member of the magical society the Golden Dawn, her pioneering and questioning spirit encouraged her to sample some of the more controversial aspects of her time. Mrs Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in her own right.
But that spring Constance's entire life was eclipsed by scandal.…
I am the author of the Sherlockiana duology My Dear Watson and Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories. I chose these books because they all have British women at the helm, involve detectives and/or investigative processes, and contain close-to-home scandals and intrigue. In that sense, these are “domestic” mysteries—books that contain puzzles related to everyday household drama. Miss Marple, Harriet Vane, and the women of Baker Street solve literal detective cases. The secret writings of Anne Lister and Constance Wilde show how they decoded the homosexual element in their lives, and used their writing to maintain a sense of self in oppressive societies. Each of them are women after my own heart.
A stand-alone installment of the Miss Marple series, I chose The Moving Finger for this list because it involves letters and neighborhood gossip.
Set in the seemingly placid village of Lymstock, the story unfolds when a series of vicious poison-pen letters shatter the village’s quiet charm. The situation escalates when one recipient commits suicide, a death that requires justice.
Miss Marple enters the plot as the vicar’s houseguest and ultimately outsmarts the mystery. Her strength comes from the way others dismiss her as a harmless little old lady. To most she is unimportant and insubstantial, if they notice her at all. These assumptions free her to do detective work unnoticed.
If you like Miss Marple, there are 12 full-length books and 20 short stories that feature her shrewd adventures—enjoy!
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
I am the author of the Sherlockiana duology My Dear Watson and Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories. I chose these books because they all have British women at the helm, involve detectives and/or investigative processes, and contain close-to-home scandals and intrigue. In that sense, these are “domestic” mysteries—books that contain puzzles related to everyday household drama. Miss Marple, Harriet Vane, and the women of Baker Street solve literal detective cases. The secret writings of Anne Lister and Constance Wilde show how they decoded the homosexual element in their lives, and used their writing to maintain a sense of self in oppressive societies. Each of them are women after my own heart.
A real-life figure played in the Gentleman Jack TV series by Suranne Jones, this biography investigates Anne Lister’s personal diaries to reveal a portrait of someone remarkable: a businesswoman landowner in the early 1800s, a world traveler, and a lover of women long before the word “lesbian” would have accurately described her.
Lister’s boldness seems ahead of her time, but perhaps only because women were so rarely free to express themselves. Lister’s numerous liaisons with women, her plans to make and grow her fortune, plus her documentation of her digestive health, all make her relatable over 200 years later.
This is an important piece of LGBT and gender studies history, a bright chronicle in the archives of feminist study, and an interesting read about an extraordinary person.
The extraordinary life of history's first modern lesbian who inspired the popular television series Gentleman Jack.
Anne Lister's journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner, an intrepid world traveller ... and an unabashed lover of other women.
In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne Lister as we've never seen her before: a woman in some ways very much of her time…
Christmas, it’s often said, is a time for family, so I asked my son to answer this one for me: "He’s an all-right dad, but sometimes he’s really annoying. His most annoying habit is foraging for things in hedges. His books are actually quite good. He’s good about driving me to places. The dog loveshim.He really likes Christmas. His best Christmas habit is that he loves Christmas trees, but he never wants to put them up as early as everyone else, then he always makes us keep them up till Twelfth Night."
I’ve had so much joy imagining events below stairs in Baker Street, it would be wrong not to include a tale from above stairs. This one finds the great detective grappling with a Christmas goose, a stranger’s hat, and the stolen jewel of the title. My father used to bring me the Conan Doyle books from the library when I was a child, and would often wonder aloud what tales Mr. Holmes’s housekeeper could have told. Many years later, as a birthday gift for him, I wrote my first Mrs. Hudson novel.
Found at the corner of Goodge Street, a goose and a black felt hat. Mr Henry Baker can have the same by applying at 6.30 this evening at 221B, Baker Street.
It’s the 27th of December and Sherlock Holmes has a new mystery to solve. Who is the unlucky owner of the festive goose dropped on Tottenham Court Road on Christmas morning – and just how much do they know about the priceless gem hidden inside it?
In this classic Christmas tale, Holmes and Watson take us on a riotous ride through London in search of the answer to a…
I have been fascinated by historical fiction since childhood, when I used to read historical stories for children by such writers as Rosemary Sutcliffe and Henry Treece, moving on to Dickens and Austen in my early teens. Many of the great books about girls growing up were written in the Victorian and Edwardian periods by e.g. Louisa M Alcott, L M Montgomery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I devoured all these since they seemed to take me into a different world. I am a fiction writer rather than a historian since it is the great stories offered by history that spark my passion!
This is one novel that I can truly say kept me up all night until I’d finished all 548 pages, despite a headache and sore eyes!
A thrilling tale of deception, betrayal, and ingenuity by one of my all-time favourite writers, Fingersmith tells the story of two women from very different social classes. One is a young thief, the other from an aristocratic family, a secretary to her corrupt uncle.
In the course of the novel, their intertwined history is exposed, along with the conspiracy to steal Maud’s fortune. There are vivid, Dickensian scenes of Victorian London and Gothic elements to the romance, but I especially admire the multiple, breathtaking plot twists. I wish I’d written it!
“Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man,…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I’ve loved Gothic fiction since I was a teen, though back then, I didn’t know it was Gothic. I just liked the creepiness, the often-isolated heroine, and the things-aren’t-what-they-seem murkiness of the stories. One of my first reads was Jane Eyre, which has remained a favorite. Though I didn’t like history in school (too much memorization!), I read several historical fiction books from different eras that fascinated me. These things, combined with another genre favorite—mystery/thriller, led to my first book. It turns out that all those things I’d gravitated to in my decades of reading became the things I most wanted to write about - mystery/thriller historical fiction with elements of Gothic.
Nobody does characters like Jess Kidd. Every person in this story is bizarre—a monster, misfit, or malefactor—yet not one feels contrived. I adored Bridie Devine, a small, rotund, pipe-smoking detective who begins to see the same ghost everywhere she goes.
Bridie’s quarry is a strange girl who’s been kidnapped and might (depending on who you ask) have supernatural powers or be a “lovely grotesque” who’s caught the eye of collectors. I fell in love with Kidd’s imaginative Victorian London, where nothing is as it seems, and evil lurks around every bend.
London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and with her reputation in tatters, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist.
As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may…
Back in the dark ages, before the internet and cell phones, the most common form of off-duty soldiers’ entertainment was reading. I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, but I was always most excited to read fantasy and science fiction. If a book has a wild new world, magic, or tech, I’m in and usually can’t get enough. I remain a cross-genre reader to this day, but fantasy and science fiction always feel like home. Bonus points for dragons.
Listed as a ‘gas lamp’ fantasy, and me being a pre-Victorian/Victorian era London fan, I had to grab this one. It had a fresh twist on the mad scientist’s experiment went wrong, creating a superhero and a supervillain. I found that exciting. I loved how the main character (the hero) struggled to learn his abilities and limitations, all the while not knowing who the villain was or what he was up to. I enjoyed this master class on how to put your main character through the wringer. And the twist ending surprised me. Great stuff.
In this heroic gaslamp fantasy, superhuman abilities bring an adventurous new dimension to 1820 London, where an outlaw speedster and a master of illusion do battle to decide who will own the city.
Think being a superhero is hard? Try being the first one.
Will’s life is a proper muddle—and all because he was “accidentally” inflicted with the ability to run faster and leap higher than any human ever. One minute he’s a blacksmith’s apprentice trying to save his master from debtor’s prison. The next he’s accused of murder and hunted as a black-hearted highwayman.
I have loved the world of Sherlock Holmes and the Victorian era ever since I first read A Study in Scarlet at age nine. Despite life getting in the way, I never lost my love for the character and the period. I continue to read both to this day. The five books I mention below are five that have stayed with me over the years. I hope you enjoy the books as much as I do.
I really loved the way this book told the story of London across the Victorian era. I often call London my spiritual home, and books about the city always capture my attention. Each chapter covers a separate topic, such as the Middle Class, Buildings, Amusements, etc., with interesting stories for each one.
I love the book as it is the sort I can pick up if I only have a few minutes to read.
Like her previous books, this book is the product of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life - and the conditions in which most people lived - so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria's wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons and transportation; the public utilities - Bazalgette on sewers and road design, Chadwick on pollution and sanitation; private charities - Peabody, Burdett Coutts - and workhouses; new terraced housing and transport, trains,…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
Short stories suit the speed of modern society. I began writing them as a child and began to get them published in magazines. My first collection of stories in 2009 got quite a lot of press in the UK and two more collections followed. Initially, they were darkly-themed backfiring scenarios for the anti-hero and I redressed the balance in Out on Top. We all deserve some good Karma!
This is often overlooked by readers of Dickens. I think the term “sketches” is important here at a point where Dickens was still experimenting with his art and particularly his characters which were always going to be his greatest strength. Sketches by Boz is a collection of fascinatingly detailed insights into London life intertwined in episodes (or scenes) as Dickens terms it through a richly caricatured study of a set of interesting lives of the working classes, in a way that only Dickens has ever been able to do. The “sketches” had, prior to this, been serialized in weekly installments (the soap operas of the day). Dickens had experienced sufficient highs and lows of social mobility in his own life to fully qualify his portrayals. "The Tuggses at Ramsgate" is perhaps for me the most memorable but the whole volume is bursting with energetic individuality and character. I have…
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come from the Victorian era. He created some of the most iconic characters and stories in English literature, including Mr. Pickwick from "The Pickwick Papers", Ebenezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol", David Copperfield, and Pip from "Great Expectations", to name a few. Dickens' began by writing serials for magazines, and from 1833-1836 he used the pseudonym Boz, taken from a childhood nickname for his younger brother. "Sketches by Boz" contains 56 stories and, like most of Dickens' work, vividly portrayed the lives of…
