A Terribly Nasty Business

.his is the second installment in Seales’s Beatrice Steele series (after A Most Agreeable Murder). Beatrice has long fought the restraints of polite society in early 19th-century England. While her mother wants her to find a rich husband to help alleviate the family’s financial troubles, Beatrice only wants to be a detective. Her strongest desire is to solve crimes with her partner, Inspector Vivek Drake, an unseemly pursuit for a lady. She convinces her mother to let her go to London for the season to make her debut, but her real motive is to join Inspector Drake to start their own detective agency. Having settled in the area of Sweetbriar with her eccentric chaperone Miss Bolton, Beatrice prepares to participate in the festivities of the social season. Tragedy strikes when one of the pillars of Sweetbriar society is murdered, and Drake and Beatrice are hired to find the killer. After infiltrating the most desired society venue, they are quickly drawn into more murders involving the elite of Sweetbriar.