Never underestimate a librarian.Intelligent cosy crime series with razor-sharp wit and an unlikely hero, for fans of P.G. Wodehouse and Muriel Spark"The crème de la crème of crime debuts." Al Guthrie"Delightful." Guardian Fifty-something Shona McMonagle is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, but has a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name. Impeccably educated and an accomplished martial artist, linguist and musician, Shona is thrilled when selected by Marcia Blaine herself to travel back in time for a one-week mission in 19th-century Russia: to pair up the beautiful, shy, orphaned heiress Lidia Ivanovna with Sasha, a handsome young man of unexplained origins — and all in a gorgeously Tolstoyan setting. But, despite all her accomplishments and good intentions, Shona might well have got the wrong end of the stick about her mission. As the body count rises, will she discover in time just who the real villain is?

Olga Wojtas is an unconventional – and very witty – writer of postmodern cosy crime fiction whose surrealist humour has been compared to the likes of PG Wodehouse, Jasper Fforde and the Marx Brothers. Her debut novel, Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar, was published in the UK and US to critical acclaim – being longlisted for the inaugural Comedy Women in Print Prize 2019, shortlisted for a CrimeFest Award, and named as one of the best mysteries and thrillers of the year by Kirkus. A journalist for more than 30 years, Olga was Scottish editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement before she began adding creative writing to her portfolio. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015 and has had numerous short stories and several novellas published. Olga's second novel, Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Vampire Menace, was published in 2020 and longlisted for that year's Comedy Women in Print Prize. She lives in Edinburgh, where she once attended James Gillespie's High School – the model for Marcia Blaine School for Girls, which appears in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the novel that inspired the Miss Blaine's Prefect series. She is president of the Edinburgh Writer's Club.