Murder Ignited
In Book 6, Penrose & Pyke’s wedding dream turns to ashes when the local women’s refuge goes up in flames.
Grace Penrose is used to protesters at Lavender House, but she never expected them to set the refuge on fire, especially not on her wedding day. And watching Charlie Pyke disappear into the inferno was definitely not on her mother’s carefully orchestrated wedding plan.
The discovery of a woman’s body in the smouldering ruins rouses Grace and Charlie’s detective instincts. With marital bliss on their minds, an investigation is the last thing they need. But how can they ignore a murder, especially when a second victim has links to the notorious importer selling opium to the Chinese community?
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Inspiration
Penrose & Pyke Book 6, Murder Ignited is set in Dunedin, New Zealand. For readers not familiar with the city, here’s a photo from Signal Hill on the north side of the harbour, marked with locations mentioned in the book.
Lavender House, the fictional women’s refuge and medical clinic in the story, is a big old house on Maitland Street, next to the town belt. Town belts were a feature of early city designs, ringing the inner city with areas of greenery that are still there today (thank goodness). An early photo of a path through the town belt is shown in this photo from the Hocken Library collection.
Grace and Charlie live to the right of Maitland Street on the steep High Street, while the suspects live on the far side of the town belt, in and around Eglinton Road.
The gasworks mentioned in the story is in South Dunedin and is now a museum (www.gasworksmuseum.org.nz). During the 1890s the gasworks was by the harbour, as shown in this picture, but it is now three blocks inland, due to land reclamation. (Source: Hocken Library)
True to the book’s title, the story starts with a fire. Fires were feared then, even more than now, as most houses in New Zealand were made of wood and only basic fire-fighting equipment was available. Local volunteers were often first on the scene, until the fire brigade arrived with their horse-drawn vehicles, as in this photo (Source: Hocken Library).
The shocking engraving below shows the fatal 1879 fire in Dunedin’s Octagon (Source: State Library of Victoria).
Rose Pascoe 
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