Book Details:
Author: Edward B. Haynes
Release Date: 4 June 2026
Series: Dr. Shaw Murder Mysteries (Book #1)
Genre: Historical Mystery
Format: E-book
Pages: 56 pages
Publisher: –
Blurb:
COLD PLATE: A Dr. Shaw Mystery
Hong Kong, 1894. A city of meticulous ledgers, colonial formality, and simmering tension—a perfect place for a professional to hide a crime.
When James Harland, a senior partner in a powerful trade firm, collapses at a dinner, the police surgeon’s verdict is swift: apoplexy. Case closed. But Dr. Shaw, a professional photographer who captured the evening on glass plates,
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hears a single, discordant detail from the attending physician: the faint, bitter-almond sweetness on the victim’s breath—the unmistakable scent of cyanide.
Armed with only her precise knowledge of chemistry and the eight undeveloped photographic plates still sealed in her darkroom, Shaw and her companion, Fenn, must race to prove the police wrong.
To expose the killer, Shaw must use her unique procedural skills to turn cold science into irrefutable evidence before the colonial authorities erase the crime entirely.
A masterful procedural mystery, perfect for readers who enjoy the methodical deduction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Set in correct Victorian Hong Kong – the research the author put in shows.
Note this is a short story – unless you want the paperback version which is slightly “large print” minimum pricing requires I set a steep price. You’ll be helping fund a real artist for a longer short story volume planned.
Review
Cold Plate by Edward B. Haynes is a restrained, intelligent historical mystery that combines forensic chemistry, early photography, colonial politics and gendered exclusion within a sharply realised 1894 Hong Kong.
The protagonist, Dr Eleanor Shaw, is a trained chemist who has been denied the formal recognition her education deserves, yet whose scientific discipline becomes indispensable when the powerful businessman James Harland collapses during a China Association dinner. What initially appears to be apoplexy begins to look like murder, while the colony rapidly settles upon a convenient Chinese suspect.
The novel’s strongest element is Eleanor’s narrative voice. She is observant, unsentimental and precise, reading rooms, gestures and silences with the same care she applies to chemical reactions. Her repeated insistence that a conclusion must not be declared before the reaction is complete becomes both a scientific principle and an ethical one.
The photographic process is particularly well integrated into the mystery. Eleanor’s cold developer preserves the marginal details that warmer, faster methods would lose, and one glass plate captures a European woman moving through the cloakroom passage shortly before Harland’s death. The metaphor is elegant without becoming overworked: the plate retains what the room ignores, just as Eleanor notices those whom colonial power habitually renders invisible. The historical photographs and period illustrations included throughout the book also strengthen its archival atmosphere, grounding the fiction in the visual world of nineteenth-century Hong Kong.
The investigation itself is economical and satisfying. The bitter-almond odour, the cyanide and glycerin purchased as “photographic sundries”, Harland’s spare hat and the suspiciously composed bookkeeper gradually form a coherent chain of evidence. The method of poisoning is inventive and suited to the protagonist’s expertise. The solution feels earned because each discovery emerges from observation, records, testimony and chemistry rather than a conveniently withheld revelation.
The book’s brevity is both a strength and a limitation. Its concise structure gives the mystery excellent control, but certain elements could support greater expansion, particularly Eleanor’s earlier life, the precise nature of her relationship with Fenn and the accused woman’s circumstances. Agnes Farquhar’s motive is poignant, yet her confession arrives so swiftly that the moral complexity surrounding her crime has limited space to deepen. The episodic headings also occasionally make the work feel closer to a polished novella or serial instalment than a fully developed novel.
Overall, Cold Plate is a thoughtful and distinctive historical mystery whose real subject is not merely murder, but the politics of who is believed, who is noticed and whose knowledge is permitted to count. Its combination of chemical reasoning, photographic evidence, feminist history and colonial critique gives the story more substance than its compact length might suggest.
The Reading Bud 
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