Book excerpt: When Cassie Pengear receives a note from a Mr. Grant saying her services had been recommended to him, she assumes he’s interested in her typing services, but she quickly learns it’s her skills at detecting he wishes to discuss. Mr. Grant suspects his aunt is trying to kill him and wants Cassie to either determine he’s right or put his mind at ease. But the aunt is murdered before Cassie can properly investigate what happened, and Cassie gets pulled into a murder investigation where the suspects are the client and his cousins. In a Victorian England that almost existed, a steampunk London where tinkerers and clockwork devices exist alongside hansom cabs and corsets, murder is still solved by traditional observation and intuition. This is the London where American typist Cassandra Pengear finds herself stumbling over corpses and helping Scotland Yard detectives solve murders (although they inexplicably prefer to call it interfering). Follow her adventures in the Cassie Pengear Mystery series, beginning with The Killing at the Carnival.