He takes great pride in being a rational man, above the messiness of emotions.

He possesses the ability to look at problems with a coldly dispassionate logic. What can you tell us about him?ĪP: Wrexford is a rich, bored, irascible aristocrat, but he’s a man of science. I became fascinated by the technology, the sciences, and I thought it would be an interesting theme.ĬP:The first series character we meet is the Earl of Wrexford. Its challenges have so much relevance to our own times. In so many ways, it’s the birth of the modern world. Radical new ideas were clashing with the conventions of the past people were questioning society, so there were many changes in every aspect of life. For me it’s such a fabulously interesting time and place, a world aswirl in silk, seduction, intrigue with the Napoleonic Wars. If you’ve been avoiding novels set in the Regency because you associate the era with pale and predictable romances, this series will open your eyes.ĬP : What lit the spark that became the Wrexford & Sloane mysteries?ĪP: It might be helpful if I explain why I love the Regency and setting my novels in that era. The characters are fascinating, the plots fast-paced and complex, and the settings richly described.

It’s best to read this series from beginning to end, as each book develops Charlotte’s and Wrexford’s relationship, revealing new insights into their past. She and Wrexford become reluctant partners, then friends, and by the time we reach book 5, Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens, they are planning their wedding. Her network of contacts-including the two urchins who live with her, known as Raven and Hawk-proves invaluable in untangling a series of murders, the first of which Bow Street is all too eager to blame on the Earl of Wrexford. One such satirist is Charlotte Sloane-a young artist who writes under the pen name A.J. Penrose’s London is a gritty place filled with canny urchins, men and women of science, engineers and international businessmen, gamblers and disgraced lords and satirists who make their living off the foibles and follies of the well-to-do. The towering figures of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer have tended to dominate the field to the point where even novels that are not primarily romances exist within Austen’s world.īut as we can see from Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford & Sloane mystery series, far more was going on during the Regency than parties and marriage politics. Great Britain’s Regency Era (1811–1820) has long been wildly popular as a subject of historical fiction yet overly focused on the romance genre.

Wrexford and sloane book 6