Murder on Cold Street

Inspector Robert Treadles of Scotland Yard is discovered in a locked room with two corpses. Both men had ties to the manufacturing firm that his wife, Alice, has recently inherited. Treadles refuses to say a word about what happened.

The evidence against him builds anyway. Alice's business decisions give him a possible motive, there are rumors of jealousy over one of the dead, and his silence looks like guilt. He is one of Charlotte Holmes's closest collaborators at the Yard, so she takes up the case.

For Charlotte it is a debt to repay more than a puzzle. She works through old resentments and half-truths among the firm's people, sorting the lies that cover small sins from the secrets that could cost a man his freedom.

Her private life presses in at the same time. Lord Ingram Ashburton, her oldest friend and sometime lover, is at last offering her what she has always wanted, and the timing could hardly be worse. This is the fifth Lady Sherlock book, and it sets a tightly built locked-room mystery beside the question of what Charlotte and Ingram owe each other.