Recommendations based on "The Scolds Bridle"

“Read this in about two sittings—absolutely loved it. Dazzlingly clever and beautifully twisty. Don’t miss it!!”—Emilia Hart, author of Weyward The gripping follow up to the “smart, stylish, and savage” (People) New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick The Club—a twisty mystery involving a cursed wealthy family and a Surrealist painting which holds the key to three suspicious deaths over the course of a century. Some women won't be painted out of history . . . Everybody knows that in 1938, runaway heiress artist Juliette Willoughby perished in an accidental studio fire in Paris, alongside her masterpiece Self Portrait As Sphinx. Fifty years later, two Cambridge art history students are confounded when they stumble across proof that the fire was no accident but something more sinister. What they uncover threatens the very foundation of Juliette’s aristocratic family and revives rumors of the infamous curse that has haunted the Willoughbys for generations. But what does their discovery mean? And how is it connected to a brutal murder in present-day Dubai? A tale of love and madness, obsession and revenge, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby unravels the riddle posed by a Sphinx who refuses to reveal her secrets . . .

An alluring literary mystery full of secrets and lies, when an art teacher at a psychiatric hospital in 1960s England finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house. Perfect for fans of Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tessa Hadley.In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park…The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she’s admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge.When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man’s past, Helen’s own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel...A gorgeously written and life-affirming novel about life’s delicate layers of experience and connection, Shy Creatures reveals all the different ways we can be confined...and liberated.

A charmingly witty fantasy adventure in the world of Strange Practice, starring Dr. Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, who must solve a dangerous medical mystery at a secret French spa for mummies.Oasis Natrun: a private, exclusive, highly secret luxury health spa for mummies, high in the hills above Marseille, equipped with the very latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Dr. Greta Helsing, London's de facto mummy specialist, it sounds like paradise. But when Greta is invited to spend four months there as the interim clinical director, it isn't long before she finds herself faced with a medical mystery that will take all her diagnostic skill to solve.A peculiar complaint is spreading among her mummy patients, one she's never seen before. With help from her friends and colleagues -- including Dr. Faust (yes, that Dr. Faust), remedial psychopomps, a sleepy scribe-god, witches, demons, a British Museum curator, and the inimitable vampyre Sir Francis Varney -- Greta must put a stop to this mysterious illness before anybody else crumbles to irreparable dust......and before the fabric of reality itself can undergo any more structural damage.

The start of a thrilling new Second World War mystery series from the number-one-bestselling and multi-award-winning author of Murder Most Unladylike .'Superb' Observer'Meticulous and sharp' Guardian'Engaging . . . You will make the journey with a spring in your step' The Times'Robin Stevens is Agatha Christie for children' Katherine Rundell on the Murder Most Unladylike series1940. Britain is at war, and a secret arm of the British government called the Ministry of Unladylike Activity is training up spies.Enter May Wong : courageous, stubborn, and desperate to help end the war so that she can go home to Hong Kong (and leave her annoying school, Deepdean, behind forever). May knows that she would make the perfect spy. After all, grown-ups always underestimate children like her.When May and her friend Eric are turned away by the Ministry, they take matters into their own hands. Masquerading as evacuees, they travel to Elysium Hall, home to the wealthy Verey family - including snobby, dramatic Nuala . They suspect that one of the Vereys is passing information to Germany. If they can prove it, the Ministry will have to take them on.But there are more secrets at Elysium Hall than May or Eric could ever have imagined.And then someone is murdered...'Spirited and fun . . . A must for young murder mystery fans' Bookseller

“Quinn evocatively balances the outward cheerfulness of the 1950s with historical observations exploring racism, misogyny, homophobia and political persecution in this sharply drawn, gripping novel.” - People Magazine The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era. Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst? Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test. A beautiful, foil cover, first edition.

“Irresistible….Amelia is still a joy.”—New York Times Book ReviewThe intrepid archeologist Amelia Peabody and her fearless family, the Emersons, are back in Egypt, and something very nasty is afoot in Lord of the Silent—New York Times bestselling Grandmaster Elizabeth Peters’s sparkling adventure with more riddles than the Sphinx and more close calls and stunning escapes than an Indiana Jones movie. Reviewers are simply agog over Lord of the Silent, calling it, “Wonderfully entertaining” (Washington Times), “Deeply satisfying” (Entertainment Weekly), and in the words of the Toronto Globe and Mail, “The hype is true. This is Peters’s best book.”

Elena Weaver, in her skimpy dresses and bright jewellery, exuded intelligence and sexuality. A student at St Stephen's College, Cambridge, she lived a life of casual but intense physical and emotional relationships, with scores to settle and targets to achieve. Until someone, lying in wait on the bank of the River Cam, where Elena went running every morning, bludgeoned the young woman to death. Called into the rarefied world of academia, Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Barbara Havers find a tangled skein of love, obsession and desire -- a maelstrom of emotion that has claimed Elena Weaver's life.

After a broken love affair, biographer Kate Kennedy retires to a remote cottage on the wild Essex coast to work on her new book until her landlord's daughter uncovers a Roman site nearby and long-buried passions are unleashed! In her lonely cottage, Kate is terrorized by mysterious forces. What do these ghosts want? That the truth about the violent events of long ago be exposed or remain concealed? Kate must struggle for her life against earthbound spirits and ancient curses as hate, jealousy, revenge and passion do battle across the centuries.

When Joss, an adopted child, discovers that her real mother has left the beautiful family home, Belheddon Hall, to her, she is thrilled, until she discovers that the Hall is haunted by a presence which will not tolerate husbands or sons living in the house. When Joss Grant inherits the beautiful old house on the East Anglian coast, it is a dream come true. Eager to begin a new life there with her husband and son, she is also impatient to find out about her newly discovered family who lived there for generations. But Joss begins to hears echoing voices and senses an invisible presence, watching her from the shadows. Are they spirits from the past? Or is it her imagination? As she learns, with mounting horror, of the house's tragic history, her fears intensify, for she realizes that both her family and her own sanity are at the mercy of a violent and powerful energy which seems beyond anyone's control. Despite the threat to her own husband and son, Joss is unable to break free, and, in a last desperate attempt, conjures up the presence to deal with 'it' once and for all.

Soon-to-be new parents Kiera and her husband, Sebastian Gage, have been hoping for a respite from their inquiries, but murder and mayhem have a startling way of dropping into their laps in the all-new historical mystery in this national bestselling series.Edinburgh, Scotland. March 1832. Kiera and Gage have been eagerly awaiting their bundle of joy but trouble has been brewing in the form of the roguish criminal Bonnie Brock Kincaid. A new book and subsequent play features some of Kincaid's daringly heinous exploits, although he swears he had nothing to do with it or the characters which are obvious representations of Kiera and Gage. While the scoundrel's fury seems genuine, as well as his determined quest to uncover the real identity of the author, the Gages still hold doubts about his innocence.A rash of crimes break out across the city, seemingly inspired by the play and book. When the publisher is found brutally murdered--in an imitation of a gruesome scene--the finger not only points to Bonnie Brock as the possible culprit, but also the Gages, who have been outspoken in their condemnation of the tale. Now, the Gages are on a hunt to unmask the killer. Between the infamy garnered by the play, the cholera outbreak still wreaking havoc throughout the city, and the impending birth of their child, they will need all the resources they can garner.But family quarrels and the revelation of a secret Kiera has been keeping from Sebastian threaten to undermine everything they have overcome. When they find themselves in the crosshairs of the killer, trapped in the squalid underground vaults of the city, they will soon discover that the truth does not always set you free, and death can lurk around any corner.