Excerpt:  
​Excerpt setting: Lady Anne Ashburn and her 17-year-old cousin are waiting to hear the doctor’s report on their ailing great-aunt.
 
“Will she be all right?” Georgina blurted. “I was all at sixes and sevens, never having taken care of a sick room before.”
“I know you were a great comfort. And now that the doctor is here, he will know just what to do.” Anne put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Come, sit down, and tell me what has transpired. When did she take ill?”
As they sat close together on the edge of the bed and discussed their aunt’s illness, Georgina relaxed, and they shared a quiet laugh over Aunt Meg’s determination to keep playing Whist late Friday night until she won.
“There you are,” Anne said. “Auntie has simply done too much. She refuses to accept it is that time in life when she should slow down just a trifle. I daresay this is one of those passing ailments.”
“I hope so.” But Georgina’s troubled expression returned, her gaze fixed on her lap. She sighed repeatedly, which Anne interpreted as her cousin wanted to tell her something but was holding back. She waited.
When Georgina decided to speak, her voice was unsteady, halting. “Um, I am afraid it was more than the card game. Or even the late hours. She has been, well, worried, and I guess it is my fault.”
“Why? What have you not told me?”
Georgina raised rounded eyes, studied Anne with a frown, and then dropped her gaze again without saying a word.
Anne stifled an impatient sigh. Despite the four-year difference in age and the width of two country shires that separated their homes, they wrote each month or two and visited when they could. Georgina often shared her troubles with Anne as she might with an older sister, and Anne was fully aware of the girl’s faults. As Georgina’s parents had no other children, they had indulged her to the point she was rather spoiled, impulsive, and often thoughtless.
By nature, Georgina had a very good heart, but it got her into scrapes more often than not, such as her rescue of an eight-year-old waif from the Leicester city streets and taking him home with her. The child’s prostitute mother reported a kidnapping, embarrassing Georgina’s family, and after the constables returned the boy to his mother, her father’s valet discovered an expensive pair of cuff links and a gold watch were missing.
Anne had held out hope that her cousin’s recent engagement to Lord John Bennington—an event highly approved by her family— would mature her, but by all accounts, it had not. The girl’s present demeanor was a guilty look Anne had seen before.
 “Georgina,” she repeated, softening her voice to conceal her rising apprehension. “What is amiss?”
“Everything.” Tears welled-over and trickled down her face. “I have ruined it all.”

​The Dead Betray None
A Viscount Ware Mystery
by J.L. Buck
Genre: Historical Regency Mystery
 
An aristocratic spy and a highborn lady cross paths over a dead body.
The Dead Betray None begins in 1811 when England is at war with France, facing the threat of revolutionaries at home, and on the verge of open conflict with America. Lucien Grey, Viscount Ware, has secretly  spied for the Crown on the Continent the last four years. Called home on family matters, he soon becomes bored with such a leisurely life. Then a French spy carrying a vital dispatch is captured, but the document  he carried--which could mean the difference between victory or defeat for Wellington's army--is stolen by a band of thieves.
Lucien agrees to assist the War Office  in recovering the dispatch, but he never envisioned the mission would include  such perilous complications  that would lead him from London's crime world to polite society's ballrooms and even into the shadows of the very government he serves.

Review:
The thieves didn’t just steal a few precious baubles from the guests at Baron Sherbourne’s house party; they may have stolen England’s future. For among the jewels, money, and dueling pistols was a packet of papers that contain the key to cracking Napoleon’s new encryption system. So instead of letting the local constabulary investigate, Lucien Grey, Viscount Ware, is sent in by the British government to take charge of the case. Among the people Lucien questions is Lady Anne Ashburn, whose great aunt was one of Sherbourne’s guests. While Anne might not be involved with the theft, Lucien is convinced she is up to something. This becomes all the more apparent the next time the two meet, which just happens to be over a dead body. Expertly entwining an impeccably evoked historical setting and a compelling cast of characters, Buck launches her new Regency-set mystery series on a high note, making this an easy sell to fans of Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby series, not to mention C. S. Harris’ Sebastian St. Cyr books.
Booklist, a review magazine of the American Library Association, May 2022
​
Buy Links:
Amazon * B&N * Google * Kobo

Giveaway
$10 Amazon
Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
https://www.silverdaggertours.com/sdsxx-tours/the-dead-betray-none-book-tour-and-giveaway​

New Release coming on July 19th. Check out her Author Interview on AllyShields. com: allyshields.com/blog/talking-with-donnarae-menard-about-her-latest-cozy-mystery
​