Best read in order, the murders stand alone, but Hetty's heart and the 140-year-old secret in her own front parlor unspool across the whole series.
Wexcombe's most sought-after matchmaker can see the dead, which is dreadfully inconvenient when her season's triumph ends with the bride's tyrannical guardian face-down at the betrothal ball, and his furious ghost refuses to cross over until she names his killer. A ballroom full of motive, a reputation hanging by a thread, and a skeptical magistrate who keeps turning up at exactly the wrong moment.
Hired to net a viscount's impossible daughter a husband, Hetty arrives at a glittering, snowbound house party, just in time for the prize bachelor to drop dead between the soup and the fish, and for Sir Crispin to recognize the family portrait on the wall. A closed circle of suspects, a charming victim with a great many secrets, and the first faint thread of a far older mystery.
When a fashionable medium who'd begun whispering that Hetty "talks to herself" turns up murdered mid-s茅ance, Hetty must solve the death of the one person who guessed her secret, before the killer who shares it comes for her. An impossible killing in a darkened room, a craze sweeping the spa town, and a charged moment with Mr. Hartley she did not see coming.
A duke's ward, the London Season, Almack's at its most vicious, and when the ton's most powerful hostess is murdered, Hetty's discreet inquiries collide with the discovery of who Sir Crispin wronged, and who wronged him. The stakes rise, the secret grows perilous, and the one man she cannot lie to begins to notice she has been lying all along.
A death on her own doorstep drags the Crewe house's buried history into the light, and Hetty realizes that solving Sir Crispin's 140-year-old murder and surviving the present one may be the very same problem, if her secret doesn't get her ruined first. The danger turns personal, and the truth she has hidden longest can be hidden no more.
At the long-promised wedding of the couple Hetty first matched, the past comes to collect: the season's last murder is bound to Sir Crispin's, and to set a rake's soul free at last, Hetty must risk everything she has hidden, and everyone she loves. The mystery, the romance, and one stubborn ghost's century of waiting, all resolved.
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