Windows To The World

                              A Broken Vessel
                                                    by KateRoss

No detection team was ever more mismatched: Julian Kestrel, the debonair and elegant regency dandy, and Sally Stokes, a bold and bewitching Cockney prostitute and thief. But one night fate throws them together, giving them the only clue that can unmask a diabolical killer.

It all starts in London's notorious Haymarket District, where Sally picks up three men one after the other and nicknames them Bristles, Blue Eyes, and Blinkers. From each of them Sally steals a handkerchief -- and from one she mistakenly steals a letter that contains an urgent appeal for help as well. But which man did she get the letter from? Who is the distraught young woman who wrote it? And where is she being held against her will? These questions take on a new urgency when Sally finds the writer of the letter -- dead.

Luckily, Sally's brother is none other than Dipper, reformed pickpocket and now valet to gifted amateur sleuth Julian Kestrel. The authorities dismiss the girl's death as suicide, but to Kestrel it looks more like murder. To prove it, he must track down Bristles, Blue Eyes, and Blinkers, and find out which of them had the dead girl's letter. Sally uses all her ingenuity and daring to help Kestrel solve his case. 

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A Broken Vessel was the 1994 winner of the Historicon's Gargoyle Award for Best Historical Mystery.

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Kate is very clear on why she was intrigued by the Regency Period. "The 1820's in England marks a fascinating transition between the swashbuckling 1700s and the workaday Victorian world. In addition, the dandy of the period -- elegant, observant, witty, detail-oriented, and cool under fire -- makes a terrific sleuth. Finally, 1820s England is a good hunting ground for an amateur detective because of the lack of a professional police. I do, however, hope to take the series to the founding of Scotland Yard's Metropolitan Police in 1829."

Katherine (Kate) Ross was the author of the successful Julian Kestrel mystery series, a graduate of Wellesley College and theYale law school, and was a trial lawyer for the Boston law firm of Sullivan & Worcester. After a long battle with cancer, Kate passed away on March 12, 1998.  There are four novels: Cut To The Quick, A Broken Vessel, Whom The Gods Love and The Devil In Music. A fifth was in the works at the time of her passing.