Case of the Wandering Scholar

M.C. Beaton meets Miss Marple in the second book in the charming Laetitia Rodd Mysteries, which sees Kate Saunders’ Victorian lady detective on the hunt for a missing Oxford scholar who is soon to be the heir to a fortuneIt is 1851 and Laetitia Rodd is enjoying a well-earned holiday when she receives an urgent request for her services.Wealthy businessman Jacob Welland implores Mrs. Rodd to find his beloved brother, a brilliant Oxford scholar who took to wandering the countryside and one day simply failed to return. The last sighting was in a gypsy camp ten years before – where it was rumoured he was learning great secrets that would one day astound the world. Mrs. Rodd travels to Oxford and begins her search for the wandering scholar. But as the investigation unfolds, she discovers something sinister is lurking in this peaceful landscape.

A Dickensian glow pervades this immensely satisfying novel. Hugely enjoyable, Saunders’s prose is precise and a pleasure to read. The plot twists and turns, and Laetitia is a warm and engaging heroine, Pure delight

Kate Saunders is an author and journalist. She has worked for The Times, Sunday Times, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and Cosmopolitan amongst others, and has contributed to Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Start the Week. She has written numerous books for adults and children, including the bestselling Night Shall Overtake Us, and her follow on to E Nesbit’s Five Children and It stories, Five Children on the Western Front, which won the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2014. The Secrets of Wishtide, the first book in the ‘Laetitia Rodd Mysteries’, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. She lives in London.