Ashley Gardner

Leonidas, champion gladiator of Rome, is set free from the games by a mysterious benefactor who grants him freedom, a place to live, and a servant - Cassia, a scribe - to look after him....

London, 1819. When Brewster, my bodyguard, comes to me about a murder of a pugilist - and what’s more, says his wife has summoned me - I must hasten to St. Giles to find a killer before Brewster is arrested for the crime....

London 1816: After rescuing a lovely woman from an attempted robbery, Captain Lacey discovers that she is the widow of a colonel who'd been accused of murdering an English officer during the Peninsular War....

Captain Lacey stops to assist a young woman in the market at Covent Garden, and realizes to his astonishment that she is his daughter, Gabriella....

Captain Gabriel Lacey travels with Lady Breckenridge to his boyhood home in northern Norfolk only to discover mysterious happenings in and around the Lacey estate....

A Bow Street Runner summons Captain Gabriel Lacey to a Berkeley Square ballroom where a young dandy was stabbed to death during a society ball. The prime suspect: Lacey's former commander....

In "The Necklace Affair", Captain Lacey agrees to help a society matron discover what has become of her expensive diamond necklace and to clear her maid....

As Captain Gabriel Lacey prepares for his upcoming wedding, his former neighbor, Marianne Simmons, comes to him about an actress friend who's gone missing....

Captain Gabriel Lacey accompanies famous dandy Lucius Grenville to Egypt, tasked with finding an "object" in Alexandria and procuring it, whatever the cost. The task does not turn out to be so simple....

Captain Gabriel Lacey begins Spring 1818 preparing for a duel. But while he focuses on the affair of honor, darkness, greed, and death stalk the streets of London....

Captain Lacey takes a post at the Sudbury School in Berkshire. A series of disturbing pranks have the school in an uproar, and Lacey is expected to identify the prankster....

Captain Lacey is asked by Peter Thompson of the Thames River Police to help him investigate a cold case - the murder of a woman found near the docks Thompson patrols. The investigation was sidelined, considered unsolvable....

On a cold January night in 1817, former cavalry officer Captain Gabriel Lacey is summoned to the banks of the Thames to identify the body of a young woman....

When I agree to visit Grenville in his villa near Rome, I scarcely imagine that I immediately will become embroiled in mystery and mayhem. James Denis has requested that I purchase an antique from a collector, one Conte de Luca....

When James Denis is arrested for murder and lands himself in Newgate, it falls to me to prove his innocence. I have nowhere to start but in a dark street in Seven Dials and the name of the unknown man Denis is supposed to have killed.

Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars, burned out, fighting melancholia, his career ended....

AD 63. Leonidas’s former trainer, Aemil, asks him to look into the disappearances of gladiators from his ludus. Leonidas and Cassia investigate, and soon uncover gruesome murders involving some of the wealthiest citizens of Rome....

Leonidas is coerced into a dice game at his local popina, with a stranger who turns out to not be such a stranger after all. His presence puts all around him in danger, and Leonidas struggles to keep the man’s identity secret....

Captain Lacey is drawn into affairs of the highest in the land when his friend Grenville is asked by the Prince Regent to look into odd happenings in his lavish abode of Carlton House....

James Denis gives Captain Lacey a task to deliver a mysterious package to a man with an office near the Custom House on the bank of the Thames. Lacey, who has been drawn into danger delivering items for Denis before, opens the package to find a single chess piece - a white queen....