Grace Designs Mysteries

1920, Wellington, New Zealand. Grace Devine is poised to build her thriving dress design business as the twenties begin to soar. But when a fashionable client is murdered, suspicion falls on Grace as the last person to see Agatha alive.

As wary clients cancel and business begins to fail, Grace decides there’s only one way to prove her innocence and save her career…this seamstress will turn sleuth to find who really murdered the showgirl.

The more she learns, the more she uncovers of the darker side of the dead woman’s personality. Agatha liked to collect secrets and use them against people. But what target snapped that fatal night? Can Grace stitch together the clues before her life is torn apart…

These heart-warming historical mysteries will send you on a unique New Zealand adventure.

As the kiwi summer draws to a close, a family outing to the beach takes a deadly turn when a lifeless body washes up on shore. Grace is devastated to recognise the victim, Ricky, who worked in her friend’s bakery. But when the supposed drowning victim is rolled over, a shocking truth is revealed—he was murdered.

Drawn into finding the murderer of the cheerful baker, Grace picks at the tangled web of secrets that surrounded Ricky. The man lived a double, or even triple, life. But which version of him had provoked the fatal encounter? Grace and her friends must find the person responsible, before another life is lost to the same tide of violence that claimed Ricky.

This is the second instalment in the Grace Designs mystery series, about a seamstress turned sleuth in Wellington, New Zealand at the dawn of the 1920s.

Edward, the Prince of Wales, is about to step foot on Kiwi soil, and Grace is frantically finishing gowns for her wealthy clients to wear at the balls thrown in his honour. But then a horrible accident and a dying man’s last moments draw her into a conspiracy to harm the prince.

As Grace follows the strands of a last memory, she discovers there is a patchwork of conspirators all with grudges against England and the royal family. This plot has unravelled beyond her group of friends, and if she’s going to hem in the anarchists and save the prince, she needs help. There’s only one person she can turn to…Detective Archer.

Can Grace discard her differences to confide in the policeman with their common goal of saving the prince, or will there be an explosive end to the royal visit?