This past week I read Deadly Hours, four novellas centered around a cursed pocket watch.

In the first, Kearsley’s mystery about the pirate who participated in the sacking of Cartagena and melted his cursed gold down to make a pocket watch named La Sirene, starts the series off with the background on the dangerous timepiece. The watch is reputed to bring bad luck and death to all who own it – and it quickly seems to be working.

In the second part Huber’s Lady Darcy is drawn into an investigation by a local criminal who is terrified by the number of deaths in Edinburgh. He is ill himself and terrified he too will die. At first, Lady Darcy dismisses the connection to a mysterious, and supposedly cursed, pocket watch with a mermaid, but she and her husband are soon are its trail.

Trent’s lady undertaker in Victorian England is working on a project to relocate a number of coffins when a murder takes place in the wealthy area. After other murders occur, all seeming to take place when the pocket watch inexplicably stops, the family that owns the watch can’t get rid of it fast enough.

The final novella takes the story to World War II. When the man who owned the cover for the watch is murdered, and that cover stolen, it seems like a simple robbery. But other murders of people who know something about the watch soon follow. Somebody is determined to own that timepiece. At the same time, transmissions in code are being sent to Germany, drawing the attention of two men from M15.

All of these novellas are well-written and highly entertaining. This was like have four books, instead of one. Highly recommended.