Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread

Introducing Rose Burnham: designer, dressmaker . . . detective?

Rose had the sense of a thread being pulled. One tug and everything could unravel.

South-east London, 1925.

Talented, ambitious designer-dressmaker Rose Burnham knows well both the strains of her profession and the secrets it can yield. Newly established in her own business, she and her sisters are privy to the hushed conversations that unspool behind the fitting room’s closed doors.

So when a major client finds herself the victim of a deception, it is Rose she tells. Driven by the shortage of men following the Great War, Miss Holmes had engaged the services of a matrimonial agency, only to be cheated out of her inheritance by a fake suitor.

Rose is determined to bring the swindler to justice. To begin with, playing the detective is a grand adventure, but as pressures mount and an old friend receives a troubling string of poison-pen letters, Rose discovers there is more to investigating – and these investigations – than she’d bargained for.

‘A hat box of delights, full of period detail and thoroughly enjoyable.’
Claire Wilcox, author of Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes and Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion

'One of those books that transports you, making you forget about real life and full of delightful characters that spring to life. I actually felt like I was there in the story with them. For all fans of historical fiction!' Five-star reader review