MURDER MADE HER WICKED

Marigold Manners is determined to make her way in a world that devalues women.

After meeting a family she never knew she had, solving a murder, and escaping death in Misery Hates Company (2024), Marigold returns in 1894 to Wellesley College, where she hopes to complete her dream of a college education using the money she made selling her story to The Argosy magazine. Her friend Isabella, a high-end couturier, still wants her to wed Jonathan Cabot Cox, a well-connected lawyer she’s already turned down despite her love for him because she refuses to be hemmed in by the strictures of marriage. Invited to row for the seniors, she joins them at the lake, where she discovers a body partly hidden in the water. Spotting a hat she thinks belongs to a friend, she bravely enters the frigid water to bring the body to shore, where nobody recognizes the young woman. Marigold’s accused of murder by her distant cousin and enemy Sarah Appleton, who knows of her tangled family history, but the campus doctor notes that the victim was strangled by someone with much larger hands. Marigold feels impelled to investigate the death, which soon becomes well-known after a story in a tabloid paper suggests that the girl killed herself because she was pregnant. Since the local watch officers are useless, Marigold makes a bargain with the handsome, charming reporter who wrote the story, but he doesn’t hold up his end of the deal. The body is finally identified as that of a brilliant local girl, niece of a Wellesley professor, who was thought to have run away to England with an unsuitable man. With the help of many people, Marigold unravels a complicated plot.

A fascinating sleuth whose dramatization of the dilemma of an educated woman in the 1890s adds to the allure.