A Secret Never Told (A Lady Dunbridge Mystery) 
Historical Cozy Mystery
4th in Series
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Forge Books; 1st edition (November 23, 2021)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages

Synopsis

Miss Fisher meets Downton Abbey in A Secret Never Told, the fourth installment in the critically acclaimed mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Shelley Noble.

Philomena Amesbury, expatriate Countess of Dunbridge, is bored. Coney Island in the sweltering summer of 1908 offers no shortage of diversions for a young woman of means, but sea bathing, horse racing, and even amusement parks can’t hold a candle to uncovering dastardly plots and chasing villains. Lady Dunbridge hadn’t had a big challenge in months.

Fate obliges when Phil is called upon to host a dinner party in honor of a visiting Austrian psychologist whose revolutionary theories may be of interest to the War Department, not to mention various foreign powers, and who may have already survived one attempt on his life. The guest list includes a wealthy industrialist, various rival scientists and academics, a party hypnotist, a flamboyant party-crasher, and a damaged beauty whose cloudy psyche is lost in a world of its own. Before the night is out, one of the guests is dead with a bullet between the eyes and Phil finds herself with another mystery on her hands, even if it’s unclear who exactly the intended victim was meant to be.

Worse yet, the police’s prime suspect is a mystery man who Phil happens to be rather intimately acquainted with. Now it’s up to Lady Dunbridge, with the invaluable assistance of her intrepid butler and lady’s maid, to find the real culprit before the police nab the wrong one . . .

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Guest Post

WHERE DID THAT HAPPEN?

One of the fun things about writing mysteries is deciding on the location for your murder.  Should it be someplace everyone knows?   Or a secluded place where no one ever goes?  And the best part of writing historical mysteries is that nothing you write about has stayed the same.  And sometimes the things you expect aren’t always the things you learn.  Some of those things are amazing, even if you end up not even using them in the story.

In A SECRET NEVER TOLD,  I chose Coney Island for much of the action.  Now, the Coney Island of 1908  is much different than the Coney Island of today.  Not just in the clothes and the amusements. But that’s another fun thing about living close to your mystery location.  You get to go “on-site” just to take a look and imagine.

And even as you stand there, knowing that everything is different, for a moment,  you can almost see the way things were.  The rides have gotten much more sophisticated and thrilling since the days of the Steeplechase mechanical horse race or the human roulette wheel.  And certainly, fashion has changed.

Today, hardly any man goes for a day at the beach dressed in a summer suit and a boater, though they did in 1908.  Women wore ankle-length dresses or long skirts and long-sleeved blouses.  They covered their heads with wide brim hats and carried big black umbrellas because (as it turns out they knew better than we do)  the sun was bad for the complexion.

Women’s swimsuits were cumbersome in 1908  but improved over the earlier full skirts, stockings, shoes, and caps worn just a decade before.

Things we never really think about but were distinctive for their time.

And maybe we think oh how quaint,  and feel a certain nostalgia for those long-ago days.  And occasionally a fact startles you.  There were quite a few in my studies of 1908  Coney Island.  One that has really stuck in my mind, though it didn’t make it into the book was that among the many “sideshows” along the boardwalk, in the days of bearded ladies, and giants and wild men from Borneo, one such sideshow was The “baby incubator” where rows of premature babies lived in glass incubators.

This exhibit was the brainchild of Dr. Martin Couney who created and ran the exhibit from 1903 until the 1930s and was located inside the “Dreamland” amusement park.

Developed in the 1880s in Paris, the incubator offered a controlled environment for babies born too early to acclimate to normal surroundings.  The hospitals appear to have had no interest in adopting the use of incubators.  So mothers brought their premature, underweight babies to Dreamland and the incubator sideshow to save their lives.

The actual incubators were presided over by nurses and doctors; the room and equipment were sanitized.  The parents were never charged for the care their children received. The operation of these life-saving machines and salaries of the nurses were paid for from the proceeds of ticket sales. Over the years, Couney and his medical staff managed to save the lives of thousands of babies. Until finally during the 1940s, hospitals began to adopt  Couney’s incubators and his technique for saving the lives of the most vulnerable.

How’s that for a surprise?

About the Author

Shelley Noble is the author of the Lady  Dunbridge Gilded Age mysteries beginning with ASK ME NO QUESTIONS, and  The Newport  Gilded Age mysteries. As Shelley Freydont she has written several amateur sleuth series.

She is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nine novels of women’s fiction. WHISPER BEACH and BEACH COLORS, were Amazon and Nook bestsellers. The latest, LUCKY’S BEACH, was published in June 2020.

A former professional dancer and choreographer, Shelley lives at the Jersey shore where she indulges her passion for lighthouses and vintage carousels.

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