The Postcard Diagram — A Gilded Peacock Mystery, Book 1

Chicago, 1926. On the Stroll, everybody keeps two faces. Corinne Voss keeps time.

She is the new dance captain at the Gilded Peacock, a Bronzeville supper club that is one respectable house by daylight and quite another once the tablecloths come off. Corinne counts the line, sells the smile, and keeps her head down—because in her neighborhood the wrong question in the wrong ear can shutter a club or fill a policeman's notebook.

Four years ago her sister Camille walked out with a manager and a smile and never came back. All Corinne has left of her is a postcard that isn't written in words. Camille drew her message in dance steps—little boxes of heel and toe, and a strange hooked latch in the corner—because a manager could confiscate a letter, but he could never take a woman's feet. For four years Corinne read that card as a keepsake. She was wrong. It was a warning, written in the one ink no one could steal.

Then the Peacock's aging dresser is found dead in the club's back room, one hand reaching for a small, unmarked trunk fitted with that very same hooked latch. The house calls it a weak heart. Corinne knows better. The old woman died mid-sentence, a single shoe-tack set on the floor beside her—finishing a message Camille began years before.

What follows is a quiet, dangerous hunt for the truth, carried out where the women of the Stroll can actually speak: in kitchens and beauty parlors and back alleys, over soup and hot irons and secrets that cost more than money.

The trail leads to Vernon Clay—a theatrical-freight owner with a hotel-school "please," a co-signed note on the club, and a habit of calling young performers "featured" when he means something far colder. He is not a man with a knife. He is a man with a clean coat and a smile he uses like a fist, a man who owns things—including, in his own mind, people. And the truth Corinne cannot look away from is that her sister's story is not over and buried. It is still happening. To another girl. This very Saturday.

To stop him, Corinne has almost nothing: no badge, a captain's "extra" that can be snatched away like a whistle, and a club owner buying silence to keep her license from shaking. What she has instead is her people—Hallie Broome, her landlady, whose kitchen is the true opposite of a cover-up; Dess Pryor, whose beauty shop hears everything; a piano man who can read her sister's coded steps; a record-shop owner whose help always comes with a collar on it; and a delivery boy, a dresser's niece, and a runaway dancer who each hold one piece of the truth.

Set in the vivid, embattled, dazzling world of 1920s Black Chicago, THE POSTCARD DIAGRAM is a historical cozy mystery about survival and dignity, about the people who get written down as somebody else's property and refuse to stay there, and about the quiet power of a well-run kitchen against a man who thinks he owns the room. It is the first of the Gilded Peacock Mysteries—a series with a warm heart, a clever hidden puzzle, and real teeth.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Historical cozy mysteries with a strong sense of time and place
• A clever amateur sleuth and a mystery you can piece together yourself
• Rich 1920s atmosphere and vivid supporting characters
• Warmth, wit, and found family—with genuine stakes underneath

Steps lead somewhere. The truth always does.

Start the series today.

Book 1 of The Gilded Peacock Mysteries.