“Take my advice, Miss Cross, and marry a rich man. Then you may do whatever you like.” The train from New York City to North Kingstown, Rho

A dilemma facing Emma Cross, my sleuth in The Gilded Newport Mysteries, is whether or not to marry. And if she does decide to marry, which man should she choose: the debonair, wealthy, and sometimes rash Derrick Andrews, heir to a Providence newspaper fortune, or the steady, honest, and dependable Jesse Whyte, native Newporter and police detective. With Derrick she would never again need to worry about money, but she would also become a society wife facing an endless schedule

Newport, RI September 1896 “You will come down from there this instant. Now, sir.” I clapped my hands for emphasis, but to no avail. The individual whose disorderly bulk presently concealed the newest tear in the leather seat of my buggy merely tilted his head at me with an infuriating mixture of defiance and incomprehension. That look begged the question: How could I possibly object to his accompanying me? Yes, well. Such had been my morning thus far. The same individual had

Newport, RI, June 29, 1896 I sat up in bed, my heart thumping in my throat, my ears pricked. I’d woken to high-pitched keening, an eerie, unearthly sound that gathered force in the very pit of my stomach. There had been no warning in last night’s starry skies and temperate breezes, but sometime in the ensuing hours a storm must have closed in around tiny Aquidneck Island. I knew I should hurry about the house and secure the storm shutters, yet as I continued to listen, I hear

Consuelo came to a halt beside a rosebush. I stopped beside her and waited for her to speak. She remained silent, however, staring at the scarlet blossoms but not seeming to see them; her eyes held a faraway, pensive look. “Is something wrong?” I asked her gently. “It’s what Lady Amelia just said about her parents separating, and her being taken far from home, from her brother and her father. It’s so sad, Emma. It’s . . . it’s exactly what’s happening to me. If I marry the Du