Meet the indomitable lady detective Loveday Brooke: able to assume a multitude of disguises and possessed of analytical powers rivaling those of the great Sherlock Holmes, she masters every baffling situation and solves each perplexing crime in these seven atmospheric and entertaining Victorian mysteries. While Holmes dominated the pages of The Strand, Loveday entertained readers of The Ludgate Monthly, employing her intuitive powers to unravel the connection between a jewel theft and a suicide note, to detect the reasons for the furtive behavior among members of a religious sisterhood, and to reveal the hidden truth in other intriguing cases. This edition of these hard-to-find tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction features an Introduction by a noted authority on fictional female detectives. Michele Slung discusses the importance of these stories in the context of Victorian life and literature and offers a bibliographical profile of author Catherine Louisa Pirkis. Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1839 1910) was a British mystery writer whose Loveday Brooke series was notable for being the first detective stories that featured a heroine created by a woman author. Dubbed the female Sherlock Holmes, Loveday starred in adventures that were among the bestselling successors to those of the Baker Street sleuth. AUTHOR: Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1839 1910) was a British author of detective fiction. She wrote 14 novels between 1877 and 1894 and contributed stories to magazines such as Belgravia. The Loveday Brooke stories were serialized in The Ludgate Monthly from February to July 1893 and published in book form by Hutchinson in 1894. The series was notable for being the first collection of detective stories that featured a female heroine created by a female author. Loveday Brooke was dubbed the female Sherlock Holmes, and her stories were among the bestselling successors to those of Holmes.