THE BAKER STREET CHRONICLES
The Baker Street Chronicles
Vivian Roberts
A cosy Amateur Sleuth series, set in the UK.
Plain-spoken Natalia O’Shea is good at helping people find things. She’s lost a lot in her own life, but her warm heart never fails to be touched by others in need. And in her work at the Transport for London Lost Property Office, there’s always someone to help and mysteries to solve…
Continuity: There will be continuity of character (Natalia and her colleagues), setting (London Underground and Baker Street LPO) and tone (down-to-earth, comic and warm-hearted).
1. Lost and Found
When Natalia sees a distraught husband pasting posters of his missing wife on the underground, her heart goes out to him. But what can she do? It’s not as though the LPO doesn’t already have mysteries of its own to solve – even if they are somewhat more light-hearted in nature, involving a shoe fetishist and a prankster holding lost items to ransom….
As she establishes connections to the missing woman through other items handed into the office, Natalia digs deeper and finds that the woman’s husband hasn’t been entirely innocent in the matter, though he never intended to harm his wife. Now that she knows the reason for her disappearance Natalia has to find her before it is a life rather than an object that is lost….
UK publication: August 2008
2. Mornington Crescent
Natalia becomes suspicious when items of women’s clothing and jewellery are regularly handed in from one stretch of the northbound Piccadilly line. It’s doubly strange in that they never seem to be claimed. As ever, Natalia cannot get through to her superiors who are far too wrapped up in their own – mostly petty – concerns.
Then Polly turns up asking about a lost bracelet, only to bolt as soon as Natalia asks how she lost it. Once she has befriended Polly and discovered more about what happened to her on the night she lost her bracelet, Natalia realises that there is potentially a sex attacker stalking the tube.
Piecing together the evidence of the lost property and Polly’s experience they work out when and where the attacker is likely to strike next. But are they right? And can they get anyone in authority to take them seriously before another tragedy occurs?
