A GIRL LIKE YOU: Beautiful Henrietta Von Harmon works as a 26 girl at a corner bar, Poor Pete’s, on Chicago’s northwest side. It’s 1935, but things still aren’t looking up since the big crash and her father’s subsequent suicide. Left to care for her antagonistic mother and seven younger siblings, Henrietta is persuaded to take a job as a taxi dancer at a local dance hall. Henrietta is just beginning to enjoy herself, dancing with men for ten cents a dance, when the floor matron suddenly turns up murdered. The aloof Inspector Clive Howard then appears on the scene, and Henrietta unwittingly finds herself involved in unraveling the mystery when she agrees to go undercover for him in a burlesque theater where he believes the killer lurks.

Even as Henrietta is plunged into Chicago’s grittier underworld, she struggles to still play the mother “hen” to her younger siblings and even to the pesky neighborhood boy, Stanley, who believes himself in love with her and continues to pop up in the most unlikely places, determined, ironically, to keep Henrietta safe, even from the Inspector if needs be. Despite his efforts, however, and his penchant for messing up the Inspector’s investigation, the lovely Henrietta and the impenetrable Inspector find themselves drawn to each other in most unsuitable ways.

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A RING OF TRUTH: In this second book of the series, Henrietta and Clive delightfully rewrite Pride and Prejudice―with a hint of mystery!

Newly engaged, Clive and Henrietta now begin the difficult task of meeting each other’s family. “Difficult” because Clive has neglected to tell Henrietta that he is in fact the heir to the Howard estate and fortune, and Henrietta has just discovered that her mother has been hiding secrets about her past as well. When Clive brings Henrietta to the family estate to meet his parents, they are less than enthused about his impoverished intended. Left alone in this extravagant new world when Clive returns to the city, Henrietta finds herself more at home with the servants than his family, much to the disapproval of Mrs. Howard―and soon gets caught up in the disappearance of an elderly servant’s ring, not realizing that in doing so she has become part of a bigger, darker plot.
As Clive and Henrietta attempt to discover the truth in the two very different worlds unraveling around them, they both begin to wonder: Are they meant for each other after all?

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A PROMISE GIVEN: This third book in the Henrietta and Inspector Howard series provides a delightful romp through the English countryside and back.

Anxious to be married, Henrietta and Clive push forward with their wedding plans despite their family differences, made worse now by Oldrich Exley’s attempts to control the Von Harmons. When the long-awaited wedding day arrives, there is more unfolding than just Clive and Henrietta’s vows of love. Stanley and Elsie’s relationship is sorely tested by the presence of the dashing Lieutenant Harrison Barnes-Smith and by Henrietta’s friend Rose―a situation that grows increasingly dark and confused as time goes on.

As Clive and Henrietta begin their honeymoon at Castle Linley, the Howards’ ancestral estate in England, they encounter a whole new host of characters, including the eccentric Lord and Lady Linley and Clive’s mysterious cousin, Wallace. When a man is murdered in the village on the night of a house party at the Castle, Wallace comes under suspicion―and Clive and Henrietta are reluctantly drawn into the case, despite Clive’s anxiety at involving his new bride and Henrietta’s distracting news from home.
Delicately attempting to work together for the first time, Clive and Henrietta set out to prove Wallace’s innocence, uncovering as they do so some rather shocking truths that will shake the Linley name and estate forever.

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A VEIL REMOVED: Murder is never far from this sexy couple . . . even during the holidays!

Their honeymoon abruptly ended by the untimely death of Alcott Howard, Clive and Henrietta return to Highbury, where Clive discovers all is not as it should be. Increasingly convinced that his father’s death was not an accident, Clive launches his own investigation, despite his mother’s belief that he has become “mentally disturbed” with grief. Henrietta eventually joins forces with Clive on their first real case, which becomes darker―and deadlier―than they imagined as they get closer to the truth behind Alcott’s troubled affairs.

Meanwhile, Henrietta’s sister, Elsie, begins, at Henrietta’s orchestration, to take classes at a women’s college―an attempt to evade her troubles and prevent any further romantic temptations. When she meets a bookish German custodian at the school, however, he challenges her to think for herself . . . even as she discovers some shocking secrets about his past life.

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PREORDER! Release Date: April 28, 2020

A CHILD LOST: A spiritualist, an insane asylum, a lost little girl . . .

When Clive, anxious to distract a depressed Henrietta, begs Sergeant Frank Davis for a case, he is assigned to investigating a seemingly boring affair: a spiritualist woman operating in an abandoned schoolhouse on the edge of town who is suspected of robbing people of their valuables. What begins as an open and shut case becomes more complicated, however, when Henrietta―much to Clive’s dismay―begins to believe the spiritualist’s strange ramblings.

Meanwhile, Elsie begs Clive and Henrietta to help her and the object of her budding love, Gunther, locate the whereabouts of one Liesel Klinkhammer, the German woman Gunther has traveled to America to find and the mother of the little girl, Anna, whom he has brought along with him. The search leads them to Dunning Asylum, where they discover some terrible truths about Liesel. When the child, Anna, is herself mistakenly admitted to the asylum after an epileptic fit, Clive and Henrietta return to Dunning to retrieve her. This time, however, Henrietta begins to suspect that something darker may be happening. When Clive doesn’t believe her, she decides to take matters into her own hands . . . with horrifying results.

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Interview with Michelle Cox

What attracted you to writing about the 1930s in Chicago?

That’s a good question because I’ve actually always been more attracted to the 1940s.  When I was fishing around for an idea for a new novel, however, I decided to base my protagonist, Henrietta Von Harmon, on a real woman I met while working at a nursing home on Chicago’s NW side.

This woman was apparently a real bombshell in the 1930s depression-era Chicago and had a whole string of strange jobs, including working at the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1933 as a “Dutch Girl.”  This detail was so intriguing to me that I just couldn’t pass it up.  So I shifted the book from the 1940s to the 1930s to make it work.  I didn’t realize at the time I was starting a series, however, or I might have at least initially thought twice about what decade to set it in.

So it didn’t start off as a series?

No, funnily enough!  I was originally writing just a one-off mystery because I thought I could attract an agent that way (as it turns out – not so much), but as I got deeper into the story, I started to really fall in love with these characters.  I wanted to keep their stories going, but I wasn’t all that enthused about continuing the story-line I had created.

I liked the characters, but I didn’t want to just write a series about a Chicago cop and his wife, solving crimes in a gritty 1930s Chicago.  That seemed like it had been done before, and, more to the point, I didn’t think I would enjoy describing stabbings, rapes, various murders, and child abductions . . . you get the point.  I wanted to write something a little different, so I had to change the story a little, which was to make Clive secretly wealthy, which brings up a whole host of other problems.

Your series is billed as a mystery, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s more like a big family saga?

Yes, very astute!  It is really a little of everything, which marketers and book distributors hate because they want it to fall into a clearcut genre so that they know where to put it on the bookshelf.  But the series is really a blend of genres.  It’s like Downton Abbey meets Upstairs, Downstairs with a little Agatha Cristie thrown in.  Besides being historical fiction, it’s both mystery and romance, though it doesn’t neatly follow those formulas.

They say to write something you’d like to read, so I did.  And I think it’s working – the series has won over 30 awards, and those have been in all three genres, which I think is kind of neat.

What is the best piece of advice that you have been given, and/or given away?

Hard one! There’s a couple, actually. One is “No one can stop you but yourself.” And the second is similar.  It’s from the author, Laurie Buchanan, “Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing.”

About the Author

Michelle Cox is the author of the multiple award-winning Henrietta and Inspector Howard series as well as “Novel Notes of Local Lore,” a weekly blog dedicated to Chicago’s forgotten residents. She suspects she may have once lived in the 1930s and, having yet to discover a handy time machine lying around, has resorted to writing about the era as a way of getting herself back there. Coincidentally, her books have been praised by Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and many others, so she might be on to something. Unbeknownst to most, Michelle hoards board games she doesn’t have time to play and is, not surprisingly, addicted to period dramas and big band music. Also marmalade.

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$100 Amazon Gift Card courtesy of Michelle Cox, author of the Henrietta and Inspector Howard Series (ends Apr 10)
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