A Front-Page Murder

Fiona Veitch Smith
Works of: Fiction

* Previously published as The Jazz Files, shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger *

‘I sat up to 2am in the morning to see what happened, I could not put it down’ Reader review, 5 stars

London, 1920. Starry-eyed aspiring reporter Poppy Denby swapped her quiet northern hometown for the Big Smoke to act as companion for her ailing (but ever-sharp) Aunt Dot, a pioneering Suffragette and former West End leading lady.

She may only be twenty-two, but Miss Denby knows what she wants and quickly lands a job at the Daily Globe. She expects she’s going to have to pull up her stockings and work twice as hard as her male colleagues, but what she is not ready to deal with is… murder.

It’s only Poppy’s first day on Fleet Street when one of the Globe‘s senior reporters falls to his death from the highest staircase – just moments after receiving a mysterious note. Poppy is tasked with finishing his article involving the mysterious death of a suffragette seven years earlier, about which some powerful people would prefer nothing to be said.

As Poppy investigates, she is thrown into a world of hard-drinking newspapermen, flappers and jazz clubs, and learns she must tread very carefully indeed. Luckily, she has her new-found friendship with the terribly dashing Globe photographer Daniel Rokeby who seems terribly eager to lend a helping hand…

But first of all, she’s got a murder to solve and this might just make the front page…