2024 mystery, fourth in the loose Harbinder Kaur series. Two sisters ask the detective agency to look into their mother's death, though it was ruled an accident. And it seems that several other writers have also died recently…
2012 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, first in the Ash Henderson series. A serial killer takes girls just before their thirteenth birthdays, kills them, and sends a photograph of the process every subsequent year. DC Ash Henderson is really not the man to crack the case.
2011 contemporary police mystery, fourth in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series. Stanhope, reluctantly attending the local gym, finds a woman's body in the steam room.
2022 detective fiction anthology. Twelve modern authors present their takes on Miss Marple. No editor is credited.
2017 mystery. Dale Whitehead's company has sent him to the BSD North convention, which isn't a good match for his ADD or anxieties. But when someone drops dead on stage, he seems to be the only person to have thought of murder.
2023 mystery, seventh in the Karen Pirie series. As COVID restrictions start in Scotland, a researcher at the National Library contacts the Historic Cases Unit with an unfinished manuscript in the papers of a dead writer which shows some remarkable parallels with a real murder.
1989 mystery; Holt's first novel. Sheila Malory is a widow in a Devon town, who gets involved in all the local Good Works. Naturally that ends up including poking about in a local murder. US vt Mrs Malory Investigates.
2000 mystery, twentieth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's father dies, and when she's going through his things she finds a very surprising document. Spoilers.
2024 romance/SF/mystery; 58th novel of Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). Someone's poisoning girls in public places; Dallas investigates.
2023 mystery, seventh in its series. It's 1966 in Brighton, and someone is murdering magicians' assistants again…
2004 mystery, first in a series. In 1970 a small child goes missing while camping in the garden with her sister. In 1994 a young woman is murdered in her father's office. In 1979 a new mother is found clutching an axe next to her husband's body: "He woke the baby". And in the modern day former copper turned PI Jackson Brodie investigates.
1936 semi-autobiographical novel. Robert Owen, out of the Royal Air Force, goes to work as an instructor at a small flying club in an English cathedral town.
2004 romance/SF/mystery; second of its series. Lydia Smith and Emmett London are carrying on their relationship, but they both bave prickles that the other can brush against. Oh, and someone has just tried to kill Emmett's old friend…
1983 mystery. Virginia Freer has been lightly socialising with an antique-dealing couple in her small town, and one of them is murdered. Then it turns out that a harmless old woman was killed in a way that might indicate it was related…
2022 mystery, third in the loose Harbinder Kaur series.. At a 21-year school reunion, one of the former pupils is found dead with cocaine round his nose. And he's an MP…
2023 romance/SF/mystery; 57th novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). A retired Internal Affairs officer is found shot in his home, but Dallas sees right through the apparent suicide…
2011 tartan noir, collection of loosely-linked short stories. It's a few days before Christmas in Oldcastle, and several people won't be having a merry Christmas.
1973 collection of short supernatural and mystery stories
2017 historical thriller, second of its series. After a planned expedition has to be abandoned, Veronica Speedwell and her undeclared beau Stoker are bored in London, and easily lured into investigating a Bohemian murder…
2021 mystery, sixth in its series. It's 1965, and the old impresario has died—of rat poison. DI Edgar Stephens and his team investigate, and his wife's own private enquiry agency gets involved too…
2023 romance/SF/mystery; 56th novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). The famous actress throws a party to celebrate a new project; then her husband drops dead of a champagne cocktail meant for her.
1994 mystery, sixth of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Alan Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. A young woman's body is dumped near a playing field, and it appears she may have been up to something dodgy. Meanwhile there are goings-on at the local stately home…
2000 romance/SF/mystery; first of a series. After an unfortunate incident in an alien tomb, Lydia Smith is finding it hard to get work. So she can't afford to turn down the one client who's willing to employ her, even if he clearly isn't telling her everything…
2020 mystery, second in the loose Harbinder Kaur series. An old woman is found dead by her care vistior. Nothing unexpected about that. Except that there's a threatening note tucked into the book she was reading, and she had a business card as a "Murder Consultant"…
2022 romance/SF/mystery; 55th novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). Two girls escape from a "school" for sex slaves…
Short mystery stories from 2000, in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco.
2010 police procedural mystery/horror, eighth in the Bryant and May series. The murderer-for-hire Mr Fox has escaped from custody and vanished from his previous life. But when a woman is killed by being pushed down the staircase at King's Cross, is this more of his work?
2019 mystery, fifth in its series. It's eleven years later, and the mods and rockers are threatening Brighton. But also a schoolgirl has gone missing…
2021 historical mystery; third in Baker's Anna Fairweather series (1920s amateur detection). Mrs Montford is having her portrait painted. At the end of the session, she sends Anna after the painter to change an appointment; Anna's just in time to see him stabbed in the street.
2022 horror novelette. Starr comes to work for the crime boss as handler for her pet ghoul—who may be more than the flesh-eating monstrosity she appears.
2017 mystery, fourth in its series. A "good" girl is found murdered in her lodgings, and more deaths follow. DI Edgar Stephens, and his old wartime colleague the magician Max Mephisto, investigate.
2016 historical mystery novella in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). Lady Darby, suffering from pre-wedding jitters, is determined to resolve the mystery of a necklace.
2016 mystery, third in its series. DI Edgar Stephens and his old wartime colleage the magician Max Mephisto are called in to solve the killing of their own old boss. There are cryptic clues, one of which seems to point to the imminent coronation of Elizabeth II.
2021 historical mystery; second in Baker's Anna Fairweather series (1920s amateur detection). Mrs Montford, recuperating after the death of her husband, takes Anna to Brighton, where Anna helps pull a drowning woman out of the sea—too late, alas.
Fifth, roughly, of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant, but not detective fiction in the conventional sense. Stuck on his back in hospital after being injured on the job, Grant becomes bored, and finds himself looking into the murder of the Princes in the Tower.
2015 historical mystery; fourth in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). While Lady Darby is lodging in Edinburgh with her pregnant sister, one of he portrait subjects drops dead, apparently of an "apoplexy".
2015 mystery, second in its series. DI Edgar Stephens works reluctantly with the magician Max Mephisto, this time on a case of missing children.
1958 police procedural, sixth in the 87th Precinct series. A blackmailer is shot in a drive-by; the 87th has to find out which of his victims did it.
2014 mystery. It's 1950, and variety is on its last legs. Two wartime friends meet again over the investigation of a series of grotesque, and perhaps meaningful, murders.
2023 mystery anthology, fifth of the British Library's series of seasonal mysteries.
2014 historical mystery; third in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). Still shaken by the events of the previous book, Lady Darby must step forward again when a caretaker is murdered and a body stolen…
2020 historical mystery; first in Baker's Anna Fairweather series (1920s amateur detection). Anna is a maid in the country house of Colonel and Mrs Montford; when the Colonel drops dead during his 70th birthday party, she's one of the few people who thinks it might be murder…
2011 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), eighth in its series. All the fæces hits the fan at once.
2007 contemporary police mystery, third in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series. A few days apart, two unrelated people are strangled, a troubled young man and a trainee teacher, and their bodies laid out in water surrounded by flowers.
2013 historical mystery; second in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). On the way to Edinburgh, Lady Darby stops at the Dalmays', where scandal, madness and murder will all be unveiled…
2011 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), seventh in its series. War is not good for people.
1999 mystery, nineteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Or, this time, in Kauai, as her office neighbour Glenna Stanleigh asks for extra security on a troubled documentary film project.
2011 interstitial collection of letters, in the Fergusson-Van Alstyne series. Various people write to friends and family on deployment.
1993 mystery, nineteenth and last in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Susan Gardiner unexpectedly inherits a run-down country pub and, since she's trained in restaurant management, decides to refurbish it and open it as a restaurant. Then one of her customers dies from mushroom poisoning…
2023 mystery story, seventh of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes is taking a sea voyage, both to assist the Crown in recovering some missing files and to spend time with her lover. But as always murder supervenes.
2012 mystery short story, fifth in the series (police plus amateur detection). One of Ruth's old university friends has died in a house fire, but he'd already written to ask her to come and have a look at something he'd found in the post-Roman site at Ribchester…
1989 mystery, eighteenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. The government of the Caribbean island of Tampica seems to have been taken over by drug smugglers; but what can Tibbett do to stop them?
2012 historical mystery; first in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). Lady Darby has retired from society to her brother-in-law's Scottish castle after the death of her husband tainted her with his scandal, but her sister is throwing a party, and not everyone will leave it alive…
2011 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, seventh in the Logan McRae series. The most popular contestants on Britain's Next Big Star have been kidnapped – but is it all a hoax by the promoter? Meanwhile the target of a drugs bust seems to think he can get Logan to get him the drugs back…
2007 mystery, fourth in Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series. A cut-price rival bakery, a dangerous new drug, a prickly neo-Pagan conference, Nazi-looted gold…
1947 mystery-comedy, dir. Edward Buzzell, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. That devil music, it's no good!
1992 mystery. Helen Lovelace dies peacefully at eighty-eight. But when her surviving relatives turn up, a glamorous Hollywood star and an Australian businessman, one will soon be shot dead and the other suspected of the murder…
1944 mystery-comedy, dir. Richard Thorpe, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. There's nothing like going back to your home town.
1941 mystery-comedy, dir. W. S. van Dyke, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. Can new screenwriters revive the series, without Dashiell Hammett's help?
2017 short story in the Lady Sherlock series. A client has a mysterious puzzle box…
1939 mystery-comedy, dir. W. S. van Dyke, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. Everyone wanted the old man dead.
1957 police procedural, fifth in the 87th Precinct series. The beautiful redhead is gunned down in a liquor store. But everyone who knew her seems to have had a motive.
1936 mystery-comedy, dir. W. S. van Dyke, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. The husband has deserted his wife, and she wants to track him down.
1934 mystery-comedy, dir. W. S. van Dyke, William Powell, Myrna Loy: IMDb / allmovie. Turns out life doesn't have to end at marriage.
1985 mystery, seventeenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Returning from Amsterdam, Henry and Emmy can't get a cabin on the night ferry, and end up having to rough it in seats. In the morning, one of their fellow travellers has been murdered…
2008 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), sixth in its series. Police chief Van Alstyne is still working through grief over his dead wife. But he still has to be the police chief.
1993 mystery, fifth of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Alan Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. Meredith's asked to help out her nervous friend Ursula on an archaeological dig when a bunch of new age travellers set up nearby, but what Ursula's really concerned about is whether her obsessive ex (also on the dig) may have murdered his wife…
1983 mystery, sixteenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Tibbett receives a letter from an obvious crank: a crossword, to which the answers hint at undetected murders. The resolution of that is straightforward enough, but it's only the beginning…
1980 mystery. Virginia is staying in the country with some friends, but when her estranged husband Felix turns up there's bound to be trouble…
2006 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), fifth in its series. Van Alstyne the police chief is known to be on the outs with his wife, which makes it awkward when her body is found…
1948 mystery. Robert Blair is a solicitor in a country town, settling comfortably into middle age. Then the two odd women who've moved into the impractical and isolated house known as The Franchise find themselves accused of kidnapping and torture…
1984 audio adaptation by Neville Teller of Anthony Berkeley's 1929 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. The womanising Sir Eustace was sent a box of chocolates, which he gave to Graham Bendix; Graham was taken ill, and his wife died. A circle of amateur criminologists tries to work out what happened.
2012 mystery-adjacent short story. With a young daughter, Ruth Galloway feels she ought to get a Christmas tree and otherwise have a "proper" Christmas.
2022 whodunnit, dir. Rian Johnson, Daniel Craig, Janelle Monáe: IMDb / allmovie. The tech billionaire hosts a murder mystery party on his private island. It doesn't go well.
2003 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1948 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. Rosaleen had just married her very rich husband when their flat in London was bombed and she was the only survivor. Two years later, the war's over and his relatives are coming round with their hands out…
1978 mystery. The rich old woman dies, not unexpectedly. But her relatives and her solicitor are all going to be surprised, some of them fatally.
2019 whodunnit, dir. Rian Johnson, Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas: IMDb / allmovie. The rich old man is stabbed after his 85th birthday party; whodunnit?
1980 mystery, fifteenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Henry and Emmy are back in the British Seaward Islands for a boating holiday. But people have been disappearing…
2005 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), fourth in its series. The old family woodland is going to be sold to an alliance of environmental group and logging company, and that triggers a variety of bad behaviour.
1957 police procedural, fourth in the 87th Precinct series. A con man is finding victims on the streets of Isola… and the body of a young woman has just turned up in the river.
1999 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1954 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Richard Abernethie dies; his sister Cora claims that he's been murdered, and by the next day has unambiguously been murdered herself.
1978 mystery, fourteenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Just before Lord Charlton dies, he decides to leave his company and fortune to his nephew Simon, thought by most to have died as a baby in the Blitz but secretly adopted by an American officer and his English wife. It's been a while, information has been lost, and two plausible claimants appear. But then one of them is murdered…
2011 mystery, fourth in the series (police plus amateur detection). A private museum is about to open the recently-discovered coffin of a mediæval bishop, but just before the event the museum's director drops dead next to it.
2004 mystery, third in its series. Back in 1930, Jonathan Ketchem left his wife and was never seen again. Now someone else has gone missing from the small town of Miller's Kill.
2001 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1940s mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Newlywed New Zealander Gwenda Reed finds the house she's just bought in England stranglely, even hauntingly, familiar, and then breaks down at a performance of The Duchess of Malfi…
2022 historical detection, twenty-second in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne happens across an opium-pipe, then a corpse, in a suburb to the west of Melbourne; meanwhile her family work to track down irregularities at the Blind Institute.
1994 mystery. Frances and Malcolm Chance have retired to a small village. Their neighbour is murdered, and all the secrets start to come out.
2020 historical detection, twenty-first in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne and Dot go to a spa for shell-shocked soldiers in rural Victoria and deal with small-town crimes, while the rest of her found-family look into a mystery in Melbourne.
1977 mystery, thirteenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. On an island near Tampica, but still under British rule, the murder of a US senator has raised racial tensions. Everyone thinks they know who did it, but the evidence isn't of the best. So Tibbett is brought in to make it look good, but inconveniently insists on actually investigating… US vt The Coconut Killings.
1994 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1936 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The flashy unsuitable wife of the famous archaeologist thinks someone is out to get her; everyone but her husband assume's she's just seeking attention, until she's killed.
2014 historical mystery with fantastic elements. In 1906, former military police Lieutenant William Prior is going native in German New Guinea. Then he's asked to help look into a mysterious death in the local colony of weirdoes…
2009 police procedural mystery/horror, seventh in the Bryant and May series. A headless body is found in an empty shop; someone dressed in a deerskin, with knives for antlers, is terrifying people on the construction site north of King's Cross. Where is the PCU when you need it?
2017 SF/mystery, first of an ongoing series. Caelin Morrow is an Inspector in the Professional Compliance Bureau, dedicated to rooting out dirty officials (even among the police). But when an alien ambassador is murdered, that lands on her plate too.
2003 mystery. The small New York town of Miller's Kill is seeing gay-bashing incidents which escalate until someone's killed. But how does this tie to rumours of contamination at the site of a new holiday resort?
1989 detective fiction, ninth of James's novels of Inspector (now Commander) Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh goes to an obscure headland in Norfolk to decide whether he wants to keep his deceased aunt's house; inevitably, he gets drawn into murder.
1975 mystery, twelfth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. The ambassador to the US from newly-independent Tampica has an Unsuitable Wife; when she gets horribly drunk at a diplomatic reception, then kills herself, nobody is terribly surprised. But that may not be quite what happened…
1964 murder mystery. Two years ago, Colin Lockie was ambushed on the road, and a worthless painting stolen. Now his childhood friend has spotted it for sale in an auction-house at the other end of the country. vt The Decayed Gentlewoman.
2022 fantasy. Thara Celehar continues to witness for the dead. But as with any agent of the law, there are people who don't want him doing his job.
2011 mystery, third in the series (police plus amateur detection). When a team looking at coastal erosion turns up six bodies, Ruth Galloway, a forensic anthropologist just back from maternity leave, inevitably gets involved.
1973 mystery, eleventh in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Henry and his wife Emmy visit her sister Jane, the local Cruelty Lady (representative of the RSPCA). A local character has been imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter, and Jane ends up fetching and looking after his floating population of dogs… but should it be two or three of them?
1956 police procedural, third in the 87th Precinct series. A young man is found hanging from his barred window, but he clearly died of an overdose first. What's going on?
2012 audio adaptation by Joy Wilkinson of Christie's 1945 mystery, in three 30-minute episodes. The feckless and erratic wife dies of cyanide in the champagne at her birthday party; suicide, everyone supposes. Then a year later her husband recreates the event, and dies the same way…
2002 mystery. In a small town in upstate New York, a child is left on the church steps. A few days later, a young woman who's recently given birth is found murdered in the snow…
1955 murder mystery. Fanny Lynam throws a party to celebrate the engagement of her younger half-brother, and makes her special lobster patties. That will turn out to have been a mistake.
1968 mystery. Corin Johansen moves to Boston to be a designer, and finds her rented room is cheaper if she agrees to use the kitchen… There's a ghost, you see.
2021 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, twelfth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. People are overdosing on a strange new drug, and long-buried bodies are being dug up on construction sites.
1997 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1957 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. A friend of Miss Marple's, travelling by train, sees a woman being strangled in another train running alongside; but nobody reports having found a body.
1942 mystery. On the eve of the USA joining the Second World War, self-important literary heir Hilary St. John Foulkes insists that someone is trying to murder him, and there's certainly no shortage of people who would profit by his death. Then he's found stabbed in the back in a locked room… Originally published as by "H. H. Holmes".
2011 comedic metafiction. Lacey and Paul are pot-growing siblings in rural California, who find a headless corpse on their property. "Lisa" and "David" are struggling authors who are alternating chapters of the mystery they're writing, but still have significant issues to work out from their former relationship…
2000 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1932 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. While "retired" and visiting a Cornish resort, Poirot finds a young woman who has already survived several murderous attacks.
1949 murder mystery. David came to a small seaside village to live with his sister after his nervous breakdown, only to find as his neighbour Professor Verinder, whom he holds responsible for the suicide of the girl he loved. Sure enough, the professor is soon murdered; but David's far from the only person with a motive.
2010 mystery, second in the series. After the events of the first book, Ruth Galloway is pregnant, and not quite sure how to tell anyone (particularly the father). Oh, and there's another archaeology-related crime to solve.
2004 mystery, tenth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). A very paranoid Harvard professor is being blackmailed; he hires Carlotta to sort it out.
1971 mystery, tenth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Recent widow Jane Weston goes to live in a small Swiss village; her housekeeper is accused of murdering her unfaithful husband, and Jane's evidence helps to get her convicted. Then the Tibbetts turn up to visit…
2005 contemporary police mystery, second in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series. Ten years ago, Emma's friend Abigail was murdered, and Emma found the body. The woman convicted of the crime always maintained her innocence… and now she's hanged herself. Old secrets will be dug up once more…
1986 detective fiction, seventh of James's novels of Inspector (now Commander) Adam Dalgliesh. A tramp, and an MP in the process of resigning, are both found in a church, their throats cut. Murder-suicide? Double murder? Anything to do with the anonymous letter the MP had recently received? Adam Dalgleish, in charge of a new unit dedicated to dealing with politically sensitive incidents, investigates.
1992 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1940 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The old woman had a young protégé, and now they're both dead, the protégé certainly poisoned.
2002 mystery, ninth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). As the Big Dig tunnels under Boston, Carlotta's picking up regular work working undercover for the inspectors. But people are behaving strangely, and then one of them has an "accident"…
2013 mystery-adjacent; sixth and last in the Spellmans series. Izzy took over the family private investigation company, but that doesn't mean her parents are happy with it. Oh, and someone seems to be trying to set her up for an embezzlement charge. Vt Spellman Six: The Next Generation.
1970 mystery, ninth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. An old woman who was a Bright Young Thing between the wars thinks her life is in danger, and asks for Tibbett to be her food-taster – and with all the old "friends" who are now powerful people, she can get him. So he's right there when she drops dead… US vt Many Deadly Returns.
2012 mystery-adjacent; fifth in the Spellmans series. Izzy Spellman is by now the most normal member of her family. But that really doesn't take much.
1998 mystery, eighteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. This time there are two separate cases: Sharon's secretary Ted is suddenly being secretive and angry, and someone seems to be passing herself off as Sharon…
1951 mystery; Pargeter's first mystery, and first about the Felse family. The War has come and gone, and the heroes have got their "thanks very much" and been thrown back to pick up what they can of their lives; and a German displaced person, working locally, causes so much trouble that nobody's at all surprised when his body is discovered in a stream. But even so, suspicion leaves everyone on edge. (Later republished as by Ellis Peters.)
1945 murder mystery. Kay Bryant lives in a grotty bedsit in London; as her neighbour is having a gas fire installed, the workmen turn up a revolver under the floorboards, and it's linked to the murdered former tenant of the flat. Suspicion follows.
2010 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, sixth in the Logan McRae series. McRae is assigned to the team keeping an eye on the convicted, imprisoned and now released sex offender Richard Knox. But there's more to Knox than rape and torture, and many other things are going on too…
1982 mystery, second in the Richard Jury series (cosy-ish mystery). The long-missing younger daughter (who may have been playing a Brat Farrar) turns up stabbed on a foggy winter's night…
1999 mystery, eighth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). One of Carlotta's occasional volleyball partners asks her to help out with some security advice, but the old woman blows hot and cold, and soon turns up dead.
1968 mystery, eighth in the series about Chief Inspector, now Superintendent, Henry Tibbett. A minor criminal is shot in a pub toilet; nobody in the private bar next door saw anything, particularly not his fancy girlfriend. But there's more to it than a falling-out among thieves.
2006 mystery, third in Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series. Two of Corinna's bakery staff are made dangerously ill by a mysterious "slimming tea"; a strange cult demands deliberately unpleasant bread for the mortification of the flesh; and Corinna's demanding mother turns up, because Corinna's father has run off from the collective where they live.
2010 mystery-adjacent; fourth in the Spellmans series. Izzy Spellman is a private investigator, but she doesn't do much investigation.
1993 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1930 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes.
1946 mystery. Lucy Pym's book on psychology proved to be an unexpected best-seller, and now she's a popular speaker. Henrietta, an old school friend, asks her to the physical training college that she runs, and she finds herself enchanted enough to stay on for a few days. But all is not well.
1992 mystery; fourth of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. The old stately home has finally got an owner who can do something with it: he's turned it into a hotel and high-end restaurant. But a protest by the local historical society during the grand opening ends with one of the protesters found stabbed in the wine cellar.
1982 detective fiction, second and last of James's novels of Cordelia Gray, private investigator. The fading actress Clarissa Lisle has been getting subtle threats against her life; Cordelia's employed by her (fourth) husband to look into it. This will not end well.
1956 police procedural, second in the 87th Precinct series. A mugger's attacking women in the city, with a distinctive pattern to his crimes.
2015 action/mystery, third and last in the Miranda Vaughn series. Miranda's asked to help with an audit at a resort, complicated by a film production and an FBI operation led by her potential boyfriend…
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1962 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Someone drops dead after drinking the famous actress's drink…
1941 murder mystery. The famous botanist Edgar Prees tried to hurl himself off a cliff and was prevented; the next morning he went into work as usual. Where he was promptly found dead. US vt Murder of a Suicide.
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1971 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes.
2009 mystery. Ruth Galloway is an archaeologist specialising in bones, living on the edge of a salt marsh in Norfolk. Ten years ago a child went missing; now another one has vanished…
1997 mystery, seventh in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Twenty-four years ago, Thea Janis was a teenage prodigy, who vanished and was believed dead. Now a client comes to Carlotta with a new chapter in her writing style…
2008 police procedural mystery/horror, sixth in the Bryant and May series. Women are being murdered in pubs, in a weird way. Bryant saw one of them before she died, but even the pub she went into isn't there any more…
2015 action/mystery, second in the Miranda Vaughn series. Disgraced (but found not guilty) former commercial banker Miranda is helping a whistleblower whose boss is making some very dubious-looking payments.
1967 mystery, seventh in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. The self-made man who wants to be County is found shot; nobody much regrets it, but Tibbett still gets called in to the house full of daft and self-interested people…
2009 mystery-adjacent; the Spellmans are a dysfunctional family of private investigators, but narrator Izzy is trying to get away from that. Of course it won't last.
1995 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1965 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes.
2002 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1936 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. The sinister Mr Shaitana invites four detectives to a party with his "collection" of undetected murderers. By the end of the evening, he's been stabbed…
2019 romantic mystery, sixth and last in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. Mercy's hastily dropped into an undercover job, while her police chief fiancé conducts a separate investigation.
2017 science fiction, sixth of its series. "Boss" is leading dives in the Boneyard, the stockpile of abandoned Fleet ships, in the hope of recovering hardware and learning more.
1998 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1941 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The (in)famous actress is brazenly conducting an affair, and it's not really a surprised when she turns up strangled, but everyone has an alibi…
2021 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, eleventh in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. An old woman's found burned to death in her isolated home; not an accident, not with the beating first, but with a week before the body was even discovered this is going to be a tough one. Then men start dying mysteriously, and the only connection seems to be that they've recently got divorced…
2004 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1940 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. Poirot leaves his dentist, passing a lady who loses the buckle of her shoe while getting out of a taxi. Later, it turns out that the dentist is dead. Suicide? Of course not.
2019 romantic mystery, fifth in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. A body found in the woods could be connected with an armoured car robbery thirty years ago. FBI agent Kilpatrick and her police chief fiancé Truman Daly, among others, investigate.
2016 science fiction, fifth of its series. In the heyday of the Fleet, one of the great Sector Bases is scheduled for closure – in thirty years, but that still affects people's lives now as they plan their futures. And outside the base odd things start happening, such as two pairs of shoes left at the top of the big local waterfall…
1997 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1937 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The heiress gets married (to her best friend's former fiancé), then murdered; she's joined in the latter by what seems like half the cast.
2020 Victorian fantasy. Wounded in Afghanistan, Dr J. H. Doyle returns to London and takes up with a new roommate, a renegade angel interested in the solving of crime.
2021 fantasy. Thara Celehar is a witness for the dead, a priest who can retrieve some memories of the recently-deceased. Having been of some slight assistance to the emperor, he's moved away as far as he can from the court and politics, and just wants to be able to do his job…
1940 murder mystery. Toby Dyke the journalist vaguely knows the young and naïve Lou Capell, so when she comes to him in tears wanting a place to sleep and to borrow fifteen pounds, he provides them, even though she refuses to explain why. Soon afterwards, he gets a phone call saying she's been murdered… US vt Rehearsals for Murder.
1994 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1942 mystery, in a single 90-minute episode. Amyas Crale's widow went to prison for poisoning him, and died there; now their daughter plans to marry, but worries about the possibility of a hereditary murderousness, and asks Poirot to investigate.
2022 SF/mystery; 54th novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). The woman's body, throat slit, is dumped on a playground bench, neatly dressed and made up but decades out of style. And the note reads Bad Mommy.
1995 mystery, sixth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). She may not have a client but, when shenanigans affect the cab company she drives for part-time, Carlotta can't help but get involved.
2014 action/mystery novella. Miranda's working at the mall to get some money together for Christmas presents for her friends while pining over her not-quite-a-boyfriend-yet. Then things happen.
1965 mystery, sixth in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. Tibbett's wife Emmy is invited to a reunion of staff from the fighter control station where she worked as a young woman during the war. They get together a plan to write a history of the station, with a focus on "Beau" Guest, the injured former pilot who committed suicide by aircraft. Or did he…? Somebody doesn't want the past uncovered.
1992 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1934 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The nasty American has been stabbed in his berth, but even Poirot seems unable to make sense of the evidence.
1999 mystery, first in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series. Rachel, Anne and Grace are working on an environmental study in the North Pennines, where the landowner's planning to reopen an old quarry. Their nearby neighbour, a woman with a disabled husband, apparently hangs herself, though it seems very out of character for her. And still waters are running very deep…
Contemporary fantasy, sixth in the series. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and magician, is back in London, starting with a magic-related drug overdose and following clues to the Big Bad.
2008 mystery-adjacent, second of its series. Izzy Spellman, private investigator and all-round mess, gets arrested for spying on her secretive neighbour.
1997 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1964 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. Miss Marple's nephew sends her on a winter holiday for the good of her health, but she soon gets bored; fortunately the crusty old Major drops dead just after telling her about an unsolved murder.
2021 mystery story, sixth of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes finds herself employed by Moriarty himself, to investigate the situation of his estranged daughter. But nothing is as it appears.
2018 romantic mystery, fourth in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. Skeletal human remains turn up in a blocked culvert, with a pattern of injury consistent with a killer from twenty years ago. And in this small town, many of the people who were involved back then are still around now.
1995 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1953 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Rex Fortescue dies of poisoned marmalade, and someone has filled his pocket with grains of rye.
2007 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1956 mystery, in four thirty-minute episodes. Ariadne Oliver has been blandished into organising a murder-mystery clue-hunt at the summer fête held at Nasse House, and she calls in Poirot to give the prize; but the film-obsessed local girl playing the victim is found strangled…
2014 audio adaptation by Joy Wilkinson of Christie's 1958 mystery, in three 30-minute episodes. Dr Arthur Calgary has been in the Antarctic – during which the man to whom he gave a lift one rainy night, for whom Calgary might have given an alibi, has been convicted of the murder of his mother and died in prison. But the family is oddly ungrateful for the news…
1999 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1950 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. When the local paper carries an advertisement that there'll be a murder, everyone in the village turns up to see what's going on. But it's the gunman who ends up dead…
1993 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1969 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. At a Hallowe'en party, a girl says that she once saw a murder, but didn't realise it until later. By the end of the evening she's been drowned in the apple-bobbing tub.
1981 mystery, first in the Richard Jury series (mostly cosy mystery with police investigator, rather than police procedural). When the second murder happens in the village, the local force calls in Scotland Yard. But several more people will die before it's all resolved.
2020 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, tenth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A police administrative assistant doesn't turn up for work, just as a major cross-jurisdictional investigation is kicking off. Did she tip off the targets and vanish, or is something more sinister going on?
2010 audio adaptation of Christie's 1944 mystery, in four half-hour episodes. Lady Tressilian invites her former ward for a summer visit; he insists on bringing both his ex-wife and his current one. And then people start to die.
2000 mystery, fourth and last of Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series. Julia's aunt Regina has an annoying new fortune-telling neighbour, with an even more annoying droopy niece. Julia's colleague Selena has a client who wants to know which of the underlings at his bank is abusing his position with insider dealing. Which would all be just a series of nuisances, until people start to drop dead.
2021 SF/mystery; 53rd novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). A woman is found dumped on a demolition site; while Eve Dallas is investigating that, another body turns up nearby, but it's been walled up for forty years.
1999 audio adaptation of Christie's 1942 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. The blonde dressed for a party turns up, stone dead, on the floor of the library at Gossington Hall…
1992 audio adaptation of Christie's 1933 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. Lord Edgware has been denying his actress wife a divorce; she's been talking about killing him; and then he's murdered, and his staff say they saw her enter the house. But she has a perfect alibi…
2018 mystery. Clare Cassidy's fellow teacher Ella Elphick has been stabbed to death, in a way that suggests more than casual killing. A further death, and other odd events, suggest that someone is modelling the crimes on The Stranger, a story by an obscure Victorian author that forms part of her creative writing course.
2000 audio adaptation of Christie's 1936 mystery, in one 90-minute episode. Someone with the initials A. A. is murdered in Andover, then B. B. in Bexhill; and Poirot receives a boastful letter before each killing. But how to catch them?
2006 audio adaptation of Christie's 1952 mystery, in five half-hour episodes. The snoopy cleaning-woman was bashed on the head, supposedly by her lodger for a little cash; but a little earlier, she'd got excited over a tabloid article about "Women Victims of Bygone Tragedies", some of whom may have sinned more than been sinned against.
2007 lesbian noir crime; third and last in Griffith's series about Aud Torvingen. Aud travels to Seattle to meet her mother, who's making a rare trip to the USA with her new husband. There's also a question of an underperforming commercial property…
1985 audio adaptation of Christie's 1928 mystery, in six half-hour episodes. The heiress was murdered on the train on which her estranged husband was also travelling; of course her jewels were missing, and everyone suspects her parasite of a lover. Poirot, equally of course, is not so sure.
2018 romantic mystery, third in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. One snowy night, Mercy nearly runs over a child seeking help for her dying grandmother. Who, it becomes clear, has been murdered.
1989 mystery, third of Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series. The barrister Cantrip has been called to Jersey, though he's certainly not a tax expert. It turns out that the administrators of the Daffodil Trust are becoming unexpectedly prone to sudden death…
2013 audio adaptation of Christie's 1939 mystery, in three half-hour episodes. Luke Fitzwilliam runs into a dotty old lady who's going to London to report a series of murders in her small village… but she's "accidentally" killed before she can get anywhere.
2021 science fiction novella, sixth in the Murderbot series. On Preservation Station, one of the largest polities that's not part of the Corporate Rim, someone's been murdered. And it's Murderbot who finds the body.
1996 police procedural audio in four parts, by Nick Fisher. A body is found by a tour boat going along the Regent's Canal; DSI Julie Enfield (Imelda Staunton) investigates.
1997 mystery, seventeenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. McCone's former flying instructor asks her to look into her disappeared boyfriend… then dies in a way that's surely not coincidental. And letting a client's death go unavenged isn't in the Private Eye Code.
1999 police procedural audio, four short stories, by Nick Fisher. DSI Julie Enfield (played, as usual, by Imelda Staunton) investigates.
2001 audio adaptation of Christie's 1942 mystery, in a single 90-minute episode. Someone's sending poison-pen letters in a little village, and one of the recipients has committed suicide as a result. Though Miss Marple is not so sure…
2020 mystery story, fifth of the Lady Sherlock series. Inspector Treadles, the Lestrade of this parallel Sherlock setup, is found in a room with two dead men, one of them the supposed lover of his wife. Everyone assumes he did it, and he won't speak up in his defence. Charlotte Holmes to the rescue!
1946 mystery, second in the series centred on Francis Pettigrew, a not-terribly-successful barrister. As the war begins in earnest, Pettigrew is made legal advisor to the Pin Control, the vitally important new government department controlling the production of, and preventing anyone from profiteering on, pins. But murder is never far away.
2021 SF/mystery; sixty-third story or 52nd novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). A sculptor is killed in her studio; it looks as though her lover did it. But there's more to be found behind the obvious case.
2019 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, ninth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A girl is found in a forgotten cellar, partly mummified even though she died quite recently. Then another turns up in the same state.
1993 mystery, fifth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Carlotta's hired by a woman whose daughter died in hospital, to try to get some closure; but soon the key witness dies and the client goes missing.
1964 mystery, fifth in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. When the film's leading man stumbles across the platform and dies under the wheels of an Underground train, it's clearly an accident. But then the continuity girl falls to her death from her flat…
1940 murder mystery in rural England. Anna Milne, the local Mysterious Widow, comes into the police station to report that she's run over and killed a man. As the investigation progresses it starts to look as though this was no accident; but ex-journalist Toby Dyke suspects the police are on the wrong track.
2014 contemporary fantasy, fifth in the series. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and magician, goes to Herefordshire to help the local force with the investigation into the disappearance of two girls.
2020 SF/mystery; sixty-second story of 51st novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). The latest murder victim whom Lt Eve Dallas is investigating was killed by a professional assassin… who's a figure from her husband Roarke's criminal past, and who may be out to get him too.
2006 audio adaptation of Christie's 1972 mystery, in a single 90-minute episode. Ariadne Oliver is buttonholed by a woman who wants to find out the truth about the deaths of her son's fiancée's parents, fourteen years ago; Poirot investigates.
2007 mystery or at least mystery-adjacent; first in the Spellmans series. Izzy Spellman is a private investigator, from a family of the same. This does not make things simpler when her younger sister goes missing.
2005 audio adaptation of Christie's 1920 mystery, in 5 half-hour episodes. Captain Hastings, home on leave from the front, is staying with friends at Styles Court when the elderly owner dies suddenly. He enlists his old friend Hercule Poirot to help investigate.
1990 audio adaptation of Christie's 1931 mystery, in 5 half-hour episodes. At a table-turning session in a near-snowbound house on the edge of Dartmoor, the spirit claims that Captain Trevelyan has been murdered. When the party gets down to his house later, so he has. The fiancée of the prime suspect works to clear his name.
2020 historical mystery with fantastic elements. In 1634, the Indiaman Saardam sets sail from Batavia on the eight-month journey to Amsterdam. Sammy Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to answer for a crime that nobody seems to be able to name. His bodyguard, Arent Hayes, is determined to prove his innocence. And there are signs of a demon on board…
2019 mystery story, fourth of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes continues to act as a consulting detective, this time acting to recover some blackmail-grade letters from an old flame of Mrs Watson. But of course there's much more going on than that.
2017 cosy mystery, first in the Morgan Dane series. Morgan, widowed with three small daughters, is getting back into her career as an ADA; but when the daughters' former babysitter is murdered and the neighbour kid is accused, she offers to defend him.
1936 detective fiction; second of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant. A film star's body washes up on a beach in Kent; it might have been an accidental drowning, but for a small piece of evidence.
2005 detection, second in Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series. Someone's sabotaging the local chocolate shop, the self-made messiah is angry that his latest handmaiden has been rescued, and someone's criminally annoyed with the new tenant.
2018 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, eighth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A truck driver loses control of his vehicle in the middle of Edinburgh, killing twenty people as it turns out that his cargo really wasn't what it said on the manifest.
1977 detective fiction, sixth of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. At a forensic lab in the depths of Cambridgeshire, one of the senior scientists spends the day making himself as objectionable as possible… and is found dead the next morning.
1963 mystery, fourth in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. As Style magazine is putting together its coverage of the Paris fashion show, one of the editors drinks tea full of cyanide…
2015 police procedural mystery, sixth in the Fiona Griffiths series. An archaeologist is found in her home, beheaded and transfixed with Iron Age spears.
1984 legal mystery, second of Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series. When a Trust is changed to avoid tax, one of the parties puts a high price on her compliance; but it all goes through anyway, several months before she falls from a balcony during a Boat Race party.
2018 mystery with science-fictional elements. A man wakes up in mid-shout with no memories, in the grounds of a decaying country house during a weekend party, nineteen years after the young son of the house was murdered. And someone is going to be murdered now. US vt The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.
1991 mystery, fourth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Carlotta runs into her old bandmate Dee Willis, who's stayed in the music business and finally made it big. But Dee's behaving weirdly even for her, and the past echoes into the present.
1929 detective fiction; first of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant. There's a long queue for the last night of a hugely popular musical; as the doors open, a man falls to the ground, dead, with a dagger in his back.
1992 mystery; third of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. A digger breaking ground for a new housing development turns up a recently-buried body. Meredith, house-sitting for a friend, inevitably gets involved.
2017 romantic mystery, second in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. Someone's been starting fires in the small Oregon town where Mercy grew up and is now trying to rebuild bridges with her family; when the police who turn up in response to the fires start getting shot, the FBI gets involved and puts her on the case.
1999 lesbian noir crime; second in Griffith's series about Aud Torvingen. Still shattered by grief from the loss of her true love, Aud reluctantly goes to New York to look for the missing girlfriend of an old friend.
2016 urban fantasy, third in the Shadow Police series. In this version of London, people's memories and obsessions bring something like ghosts to life… and now the ghost of Sherlock Holmes has been murdered.
1995 police procedural audio in five parts, by Nick Fisher. An accountant is killed messily in his flat in Smithfield; DSI Julie Enfield investigates.
1990 mystery, third in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). A hispanic woman asks Carlotta to retrieve her missing green card, because she doesn't trust La Migra. But then she vanishes, and the card turns up on the body of a murdered woman…
1942 mystery, first in the series centred on Francis Pettigrew, a not-terribly-successful barrister. The anonymous letters arriving for the High Court Judge while he's out on circuit are obviously the work of a lunatic; the poisoned box of chocolates is less easily dismissed.
1962 mystery, third in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. Tibbett is in Geneva for a conference on drug-smuggling, and his wife has joined him for a holiday. One of the staff is killed in a place that very few people could have reached, and Tibbett becomes the prime suspect.
2012 cosy mystery, third in the Mac Faraday series (amateur detection). Someone sends Mac the stolen last painting of Ilysa Ramsey, murdered eight years ago. Naturally, he looks into the unsolved case. Meanwhile, it seems that the same woman was murdered elsewhere a year earlier…
1993 audio adaptation of Christie's 1961 mystery, in 90 minutes. People seem to be dying very… conveniently; do the village witches of Much Deeping have anything to do with it?
2015 police procedural mystery, fifth in the Fiona Griffiths series. The body of a young woman is found in the annexe of a church, respectfully laid out and with no signs of violence. It may not even be a murder…
2019 SF/mystery; sixty-first (roughly, or 50th novel, hence presumably the title) of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). Someone beloved by everyone who knew him is killed by a cunning gas bomb.
1961 mystery, second in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. Tibbett and his wife join some friends for a week of sailing in Essex. But the accidental drowning a few months ago starts to look less so, especially when it's followed by another.
2007 police procedural mystery/horror, fifth in the Bryant and May series. With the team split up by chance and weather, they most solve two separate cases.
The BBC has occasionally been rebroadcasting the Paul Temple radio plays, dealing with a professional novelist and amateur sleuth. This one is a 2011 remounting of a lost 1946 original, starring Crawford Logan and Gerda Stevenson. Someone's supplying drugs in London, and that must be stopped!
2019 SF/mystery; sixtieth (roughly, or 49th novel) of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). Someone's torturing and killing abusive men.
2010 mystery, fourth in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. Jimmy Perez is taking his fiancée Fran Hunter home to meet his parents on Fair Isle. But over at the Fair Isle Field Centre, tensions among the isolated birdwatchers may be building up to murder.
2011 cosy mystery, second in the Mac Faraday series. Police detective turned heir Faraday finds his ex-wife importuning him to let them get back together… but soon enough she's dead, and so's her new husband.
1987 collection of short mystery stories by MacLeod.
1998 cozy American detective fiction; twelfth and last of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. A family wedding is complicated by the return of jewels long thought lost, an unexpected balloon landing… and a dead body.
1996 mystery, sixteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's brother-in-law, country music star Ricky Savage, has a stalker who may be turning nasty, just as his personal life is falling apart.
1994 mystery, sixth and last in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. Sanders and Jeffries are setting off on a romantic holiday in New Mexico when they find themselves giving a lift to two children who've missed the tour bus on which they were supposed to hitch a ride. Then things start getting quite strange.
1996 comic mystery; tenth and last of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. Peter's neighbour Jim spends most of his evenings at Fraternal Brotherhood meetings to avoid his horrible wife Mirelle; but he doesn't come back, and soon murder is afoot.
1992 mystery, fifth in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. Harriet's old flame Guy, who dumped her and ran off with her assistant, shows up again in Toronto… but not for long.
2009 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, fifth in the Logan McRae series. Someone is attacking Polish immigrants in Aberdeen, cutting out their eyes and burning the sockets – but taking care to leave them alive – then sending ranting racist letters to the police…
1991 police procedural mystery; first of Mankell's novels of Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police. Two elderly people living in a remote farmhouse are tortured to death; nothing's obviously missing, but someone fed the horse before they left. And a couple of clues point at foreigners in Sweden… (Translated by Steven T. Murray; original title Mördare utan ansikte.)
1989 mystery, second in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Carlotta's old friend on the force Mooney has been suspended after he beat up a man who attacked him; he says the guy had a knife, nobody's found one, but there's one witness who hasn't come forward. While Carlotta looks for the prostitute with the snake tattoo, a rich teenager who's been roughed up is looking for his missing girlfriend in a part of town that neither of them should be visiting…
1997 police procedural audio in four parts, by Nick Fisher. Someone is poisoned in the Reading Room of the British Library, and someone else is mummified; Detective Superintendent Julie Enfield investigates.
1995 cozy American detective fiction; eleventh of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. The administrator of the Wilkins Museum dies suddenly, and Sarah turns out to be named as her executrix.
1991 mystery/police procedural, fourth in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. A corporate chairman is found shot in a hotel room, and it looks as if the people who did it are going after the witness too, even though she doesn't know much.
2004 detection, first in Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series. Corinna runs a bakery in Melbourne; someone's sending threatening letters, the local junkies are dying, a new neighbour is drinking himself to death after his daughter ran off, and a lovely but mysterious man finds her interesting.
1994 comic mystery; ninth of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. Shandy is visiting a grower of remarkable lupines [sic, apparently American usage] when a fellow guest at the inn where he's staying collapses dead over the chicken pot pie.
1991 mystery; second of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. Now in a home posting, Mitchell moves to a hamlet in Oxfordshire with plans to commute to London. But the new friend she makes there has a fatal "accident"…
2015 police procedural mystery, fourth in the Fiona Griffiths series. Stuck with logging evidence, Fiona asks for some cold cases to look at, and is soon digging for details in her own distinctive style.
1990 mystery, third in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. A series of high-value burglaries turns lethal; and an ageing actress is murdered at her soirée, having mentioned that she might be planning to change her will. Sanders investigates; Jeffries was a guest at the party…
2007 police procedural mystery/horror, fourth in the Bryant and May series. Someone is killing celebrities by various baroque means; the Peculiar Crimes Unit balances that investigation with an attempt to prevent the unit being shut down.
1993, cosy American detective fiction; fifth and last of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. The ghost of a nineteenth-century mule-skinner turns up in town, and wants his bones found and properly buried… but doesn't much mind what happens to the chest of gold that should be near them.
2009 mystery; third in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. At an archaeological site on Whalsay, the old woman who lives nearby is shot one foggy night – accidentally, everyone assumes. Then one of the archaeologists is found with her wrists slit. DI Jimmy Perez investigates.
1999 mystery, eighth in the Robert Amiss series. Amiss is brought in to help an old, money-losing, right-wing weekly newspaper lose slightly less money. Which puts him in a prime position when one of the senior staff is murdered.
1992 cosy American detective fiction; fifth and last of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. They've gone to Wales to help celebrate Madoc's great-uncle's 90th birthday, but soon enough there's a dead body to be dealt with.
1995 mystery, fifteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. McCone's trying to get the reward for tracking down the "Diplo-Bomber" who's been sending explosive packages to various embassies and consulates… but it quickly becomes personal.
2013 historical detection, twentieth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). The hated conductor of an amateur choral ensemble is murdered… twice. And an old friend of Phryne's is in love with someone who doesn't know he exists, and who seems to be the target of murderous attacks.
1989 mystery/suspense, second in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. DI Sanders is in Ottawa for training, and annoyed at the world; but he was also the last person to see an undercover cop, apart from the murderer.
1997 mystery, seventh in the Robert Amiss series. "Jack" Troutbeck enlists Amiss to help the new but unworldly Bishop of Westonbury as his chapter suffers a rift between the high church gay traditionalists and the intolerant evangelical new dean. Murder is also involved.
1992 cozy American detective fiction; tenth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. An old friend turns up working in an atelier styled after a Renaissance guild, restoring damaged art; but quite a lot of it seems to get stolen shortly after it's been returned to the client…
1991 mystery; first of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. Mitchell is British Consul in Bratislava, home on leave to support her actor cousin Eve as Eve's daughter Sara gets married. Markby was a friend of Eve's deceased husband, and is giving away the bride. But it's Mitchell who will discover the body of the local potter who may have had something going with Sara…
2014 mystery, first in the series about Helen Binney, ex-wife of the Governor of Massachussetts and now living in a small town and suffering from lupus erythematosus. Helen's fussy nieces insist on getting her daily visits from an overbearing nurse, who later turns up beaten to death outside Helen's house.
1959 mystery, first in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. Tibbett and his wife go on a skiing holiday to a remote village on the Italian-Austrian border, but his superiors and Interpol ask him also to keep an eye on drug smuggling in the area. But what has that to do with the unpleasant German who turns up dead at the bottom of the chair-lift?
1985 police procedural, first in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries series. In Toronto, someone is raping and murdering joggers; but Detective Inspector John Sanders thinks the latest victim doesn't completely fit the pattern.
1996 mystery, sixth in the Robert Amiss series. "Jack" Troutbeck, newly Baroness Troutbeck, enlists Amiss to help organise opposition in the Lords to an anti-hunting bill. But even she didn't expect it to be murderous.
1991 Christmas-themed mystery anthology. Thirteen stories deal with crime (mostly murder) at, or themed on, Christmas.
1991 comic mystery; eighth of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. During the annual owl-counting survey, a newcomer to the town is distracted by what seems to be an out-of-place snowy owl… and is promptly hauled into a tree and stabbed to death.
2005 police procedural mystery/horror, third in the Bryant and May series. In the winter of 1973, a man dressed in Edwardian garb defaces a Waterhouse painting in the National Gallery; a guest at the Savoy dies of venom from a marshland snake. The Peculiar Crimes Unit investigates.
2014 police procedural mystery, third in the Fiona Griffiths series. A routine payroll fraud blows up into a murder enquiry, and Fiona goes undercover.
2008 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, fourth in the Logan McRae series. Twenty years ago, "The Flesher" killed and butchered – literally – people all over the UK. Thanks to flawed police work, he got out eleven years later. But it's only now that more bodies are being found, or rather more packaged meat…
2017 romantic mystery, first in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. Mercy is an FBI agent, but she grew up as a prepper, stocked up on goods and skills for the end of civilisation. Now she's sent back to the small town in Oregon that she left fifteen years ago, where preppers also seem to be the target of the latest murderer.
2014 action/mystery, first in the Miranda Vaughn series. Miranda worked hard to go to college and get a job in an investment bank… but it all fell apart, and she's spent eighteen months defending herself against fraud charges. Now she's been found not guilty… but that's not enough to get her life back.
1987 mystery, first in the Carlotta Carlyle series. Carlotta was in the Boston Police, but left for reasons which aren't yet clear; now she's a private eye without clients. Then a nice old lady, worried about what's happened to her brother, offers her a bundle of cash to look into the matter…
2010 cosy mystery, first in the Mac Faraday series. Just after his firing and divorce, homicide detective Faraday finds that his birth-mother went on to become a hugely successful mystery writer, who's left him everything in her will. So now he doesn't have to do anything but laze around… though his neighbour did get murdered recently, and the local police chief doesn't seem to be up to the job…
1994 police procedural audio in five parts, by Nick Fisher. A mutilated corpse is found on the railway tracks; Detective Superintendent Julie Enfield tries to work out what happened.
2008 mystery; second in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. A stranger turns up at the opening of an art show, and claims to have lost his memory; later, he's found hanged in a boathouse. DI Jimmy Perez investigates.
2018 mystery story, third of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes continues to act as a consulting detective, but this time she must solve the murder of Lady Ingram, found on her estranged husband's estate. And Charlotte, known to be a Fallen Woman, has been seen in Lord Ingram's company…
2007 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, third in the Logan McRae series. McRae continues to be bounced between Inspectors Insch and Steel, and to try to have a personal life too.
2018 mystery show, 10 episodes. Frankie Drake and Trudy Clarke continue to be private detectives in 1920s Toronto.
1994 mystery, fifth in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian investigation). Hester Latterly takes a job escorting an elderly lady by the overnight train from Edinburgh to London, making sure she takes her medicine on time. In the morning, her charge is dead, and soon enough Hester is charged with her murder.
1990, cosy American detective fiction; fourth of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. Industrial espionage comes to town, and the local mincemeat magnate is under attack.
2006 mystery, first in Nadel's series about Francis Hancock, East End undertaker during the Blitz. During an air raid, a man claims that he's been stabbed, then runs off; later he shows up on Hancock's slab, apparently dead of blast, but Hancock isn't satisfied.
2003 mystery, third in the Berger and Mitry series. It's tourist season in the small town of Dorset, and a film star couple is among them (she grew up in the area). But soon enough someone is going to plummet to his death.
1994 collection of short mystery stories, in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco.
1989 mystery; seventh of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. After the town's soap factory burns to the ground, it seems likely that the arson was cover for the theft of an antique weather vane.
1994 mystery, fourteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's gone independent, though she stays on good terms with All Souls and even rents office space from them; but her first case is from an old college friend, who was a bit iffy back in the day and may be even more so now. He claims he's being persecuted, but his evidence isn't great. Then things change.
2014 police procedural mystery, second in the Fiona Griffiths series. A woman's leg and foot are found in a freezer during a house clearance, and other parts are nearby; then a man's body parts start showing up in the same area.
2012 historical detection, nineteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Pregnant girls are going missing from the Magdalene Laundry; an intrepid, if not too bright, reporter gets on their trail, then goes missing too.
1989, cosy American detective fiction; fourth of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. Madoc is summoned by his father, an eminent conductor, on an orchestral tour.
2002 mystery, second in the Berger and Mitry series. Berger is settling in for the autumn to write a book about westerns, but small town politics and crime won't leave him alone; and the crime is Mitry's job too. Someone's blown up in her car on her way back from an illicit rendezvous, and she seems to have had a remarkable number of enemies.
2007 thriller/mystery; seventh of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. When Fran runs into Edna, the homeless woman she used to know when she was living in a squat, it seems like a welcome encounter; but Edna's scared of something, and someone is following her. And that's before Fran starts digging into old secrets.
2017 mystery, second of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes is doing well in her disguised life as "Sherlock" the consulting detective, but her latest client comes from rather too close to home.
2004 police procedural mystery/horror, second in the Bryant and May series. An elderly woman is found dead in the basement of her house… dressed for a trip outside, even though she hardly ever went outside, and with river water in her throat. It's not even clear that it's a crime, never mind any questions of motivation; but with the Peculiar Crimes Unit under threat of closure, Bryant and May do their best to investigate and justify their existence.
1975 detective fiction, fifth of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. After a medical scare and a hospital stay, Dalgleish visits an old friend to recuperate – only to find that the friend has died suddenly.
2019 SF/mystery; fifty-ninth (roughly, or 48th novel) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Lyle had cleaned up and got out of the gang life, and things were starting to look up for him. So when he's found dead of an overdose, Lieutenant Eve Dallas is already suspicious.
1990 cozy American detective fiction; ninth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah's Aunt Emma steps in for an ailing friend to play hostess on a private island off the Maine coast, to a party of treasure-hunters who may also harbour criminals.
2006 mystery; first in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. In a village near Lerwick, two schoolgirls visit the local mad old man, on a bet. Five days later, one of them is dead. The old man was blamed, though not convicted, when a young girl vanished eight years ago and was never found, so everyone assumes he's done it again; Inspector Jimmy Perez tries to move beyond the automatic assumption of guilt and find out what's really happened this time.
2009 mystery, first in the Kate Shackleton series (amateur detection). Kate's husband went missing in action in 1918; unable to locate him, she turned her hand to finding other vanished people. Now in 1922 an old VAD friend wants to find her missing father, who vanished after a possible suicide attempt. Some people don't want the past dug up.
2016 mystery story, first of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes has an analytical mind, but feels constrained by the roles expected of her by Victorian society. So she does something Frightful…
1998 mystery; sixth in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). The late Mr Pargeter was a criminal mastermind, though his wife "knew nothing about that"; now the dying widow of a thief who worked for him wants to restore all her stolen paintings to their rightful owners, and of course Mrs Pargeter agrees to help.
2012 police procedural mystery, first in the Fiona Griffiths series. DC Griffiths, who had a serious breakdown of some sort when she was a teenager, is the most junior member of the police team investigating the murder of a part-time prostitute and her young daughter in Cardiff.
1993 mystery, fourth in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian investigation). In 1857, at the Royal Free Hospital, a nurse is found murdered and stuffed down the laundry-chute; she was one of the new breed of nurse back from the Crimea, and while she was undoubtedly good at her job she seems to have annoyed everyone too. With the police unimpressive, Monk's patron Lady Callandra Daviot (also a trustee of the hospital) asks him to investigate.
1994 mystery, fifth in the Robert Amiss series. Amiss is recruited by his old friend "Jack" Troutbeck, Bursar of St Martha's College in Cambridge, to help her sort out the politics of how a bequest will be used. Of course, some people have strong and murderous feelings about that.
1956 police procedural, first in the 87th Precinct series. When an off-duty detective is murdered, it might have been for any number of reasons. Then his partner is shot with the same gun…
1993 mystery, thirteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco.
1991 mystery, fourth in the Robert Amiss series. Once more, Amiss' friend Pooley sends him into an institution where murder may have taken place, for a bit of unofficial undercover work. This time it's as a waiter at ffeatherstonehaugh's, originally a club for roués that's since become gentrified, then fallen on distressingly moralistic times.
2010 historical detection, eighteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne is on holiday, with daughters and maid, in the seaside resort of Queenscliff, where the servants meant to come with her rented house have vanished (along with the furniture); and that's only the first mystery.
2005 thriller/mystery; sixth of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. Fran didn't want to get involved again with Mickey Allerton, a strip club owner whom she's run into before, but he wants her to track down a dancer who's run off. And he's keeping her dog to make sure she does it.
2006 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, second in the Logan McRae series. A house is burned down, with the doors fastened shut so that the occupants can't escape; a prostitute turns up battered to death; and DS McRae deals with the aftermath of a bungled raid, and tries to serve two masters.
1990 mystery, third in the Robert Amiss series. Having resigned from the Civil Service on a point of principle, Amiss doesn't have much luck getting a job; an old police friend asks him to look, informally, into a School of English where one of the teachers has died under suspicious circumstances. More deaths follow.
1988 cozy American detective fiction; eighth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah and Max have been invited to a Renaissance Revel at the Billingsgates', to work out what's happened to their missing 1927 New Phantom Rolls Royce.
1984 mystery, second in the Robert Amiss series. Amiss is seconded to industry… well, to a dead-end privatised offshoot of the Civil Service where all the unemployables are sent to rot. And then people die.
2017 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, seventh in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A body is found in a tree; clearly it fell there, but how did it happen, and why?
1988 cozy American detective fiction; seventh of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah is pregnant, but doesn't let that slow her down much; one of the rubbish-collectors working for the Senior Citizens' Recycling Center, a family charitable project, has been fatally mugged, and it seems that there's more going on.
1924 mystery, first in the Anthony Gethryn series. A cabinet minister is beaten to death in his study; Colonel Anthony Gethryn, with a background in intelligence work but now terminally bored, investigates.
2018 SF/mystery; fifty-eighth (roughly, or 47th novel) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Someone wears an explosive vest into a meeting to finalise a corporate merger; Lieutenant Eve Dallas has to find out why he did it, and whether someone else is pulling the strings.
2003 police procedural mystery/horror, first in the Bryant and May series. In the modern day, a bomb destroys the office of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, where boss Arthur Bryant was working late. John May, while mourning his friend and colleague, looks back on their first case together, during the Blitz.
2005 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, first in the Logan McRae series. DS McRae is just back on the force after a major injury sustained in the line of duty; it's winter in Aberdeen, and the mutilated body of a kidnapped boy has just been discovered. And it won't be the last.
1996 mystery; fifth in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). Mrs Pargeter is having a house built, but a body turns up in the wine cellar, her builder is arrested, and he won't say anything to defend himself. What's going on?
1993 mystery, third in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian investigation). In 1857, General Thaddeus Carlyon, a military hero, dies in an accident during a dinner party; but when the police decide it might have been murder, his widow confesses. She is sure to be hanged, but the justification she gives for her action is clearly false; Monk the private investigator, Oliver Rathbone the barrister, and Hester Latterly the nurse returned from the Crimea, work together to dig out what really happened.
2017-2018 mystery show, 11 episodes. In 1920s Toronto, Frankie Drake, former Signals rider, and her partner Trudy Clarke, are the city's first female private detectives.
1988, cosy American detective fiction; third of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. There's a collection of antique theatrical memorabilia looking for a new home, and its owner sets a contest: whoever writes and produces the best new play, on a vaguely Canadian subject, will get it for their town. The Club gets together a two-act drama based on The Shooting of Dan McGrew, but complications follow.
1972 detective fiction, first of James's novels of Cordelia Gray, a private investigator. Having inherited a failing investigation business, Grey is employed to look into why a famous scientist's son abandoned his university course and killed himself.
1981 mystery, first in the Robert Amiss series. After a meeting of a liaison group between government and industry, Sir Nicholas Clark, Permanent Secretary of the Department of Conservation, is beaten to death with an abstract sculpture called "Reconciliation". Everyone seems to have had a motive, and then another murder follows…
1992 mystery, twelfth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Thirty-six years ago, Lis Benedict was convicted of the gruesome murder of her husband's mistress; she's just been let out of prison on grounds of ill health, and her daughter's vowed to clear her name at a trial re-enactment. But as McCone investigates the long-buried case, it becomes clear that people still have something to lose.
1936 mystery parody, first of the novels of Sergeant Beef. When Dr Thurston's wife is murdered during a weekend party, it looks like a classic locked room mystery. Three great detectives arrive, and try to solve the conundrum in their own ways. But it's up to the plodding police sergeant to save the day.
2017 historical detective fiction, sixth of Marston's novels of Inspector Harvey Marmion. In 1917, as the War drags on, Wally Hubbard breaks out of Pentonville and searches for the man who seduced and abandoned his daughter. But that isn't Marmion's only problem.
1971 detective fiction, fourth of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. A hospital on the Sussex-Hampshire border has a nurse training school attached; one of the students is poisoned during a demonstration of tube feeding, and a few weeks later another dies in her sleep.
1987 mystery; sixth of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. The old pond that provides startup hydropower to the Balaclava Agricultural College's methane plant is the site of the annual Groundhog Day festivities; this year it's also where a body has floated to the surface.
1967 detective fiction, third of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgleish is on holiday, visiting his aunt's cottage on the Suffolk coast; but one of the local writers has gone missing, and soon the police announce that his body has been found.
2017 mystery, tartan noir. In Oldcastle, a notional Scottish city that's mostly Aberdeen with some shades of Edinburgh, the detectives nobody wants (but who can't be fired) end up in the Misfit Mob. When lots of bodies turn up at once in the town dump, they get the most boring one. But now they've got a serial killer to track down…
1986, cosy American detective fiction; third of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. After Janet is nearly killed while trying to give assistance at a road accident, Madoc is brought in at the other end of the case to track down stolen military equipment.
2008 historical detection, seventeenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). As Melbourne suffers under a post-Christmas heat wave, Phryne takes on two cases: a junk dealer's suicide, which his mother earnestly believes is nothing of the sort, and the whereabouts of a possible illegitimate child from sixty years ago. Minor spoilers.
1963 detective fiction, second of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. In a London psychiatric clinic that's still adjusting to being part of the NHS, the unpopular chief administrator is stabbed in the heart. Any of the staff could have done it, and most of them had reason to; but who is guilty?
2002 thriller/mystery; fifth of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. Fran's in a play, very amateur and over a pub for one night only, but it's still acting work; and she's waitressing at the trendy pizzeria that used to be the Hot Spud Café. But something about it doesn't feel quite right, even before an illegal immigrant boy comes in, desperate to find "Max".
1972 collection of the last three short mystery stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.
2001 mystery, first in the Berger and Mitry series. Mitch Berger is a New York film critic mourning his dead wife, who rents a house in a rural (but rich) part of Connecticut; Desiree Mitry is a cop on the Serious Crimes Squad. So when Berger digs up a body in the vegetable patch…
1939 collection of seventeen short mystery stories, some involving Lord Peter Wimsey. Minor spoilers.
1937 mystery, eleventh and last of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are married at last… but at the house they've taken for their honeymoon, the owner is dead in the cellar with his head bashed in.
1985 cozy American detective fiction; sixth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah's aunt is putting on her annual Gilbert and Sullivan show, but it will be made harder by theft… and perhaps murder.
1936 mystery, tenth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. Harriet Vane, doing a favour for a friend, returns to her Oxford college for the annual dinner for former members. But someone starts sending poison-pen letters, and worse; as the closest thing the college has to an investigator, Harriet reluctantly looks into it.
1985, cosy American detective fiction; second of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. In a small town in Ontario, the new museum (of early-settlement-era tat) needs a curator. Unfortunately, the first one seems to have fallen to his death.
1934 mystery, ninth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. Stranded in a fen village on a snowy New Year's Eve, Wimsey helps out with the bell-ringing since one of the regular men is down with 'flu. But Fenchurch St. Paul has not finished with him, and soon enough a body will be found.
1992 mystery; fourth in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). Mrs Pargeter keeps an old friend company at a visit to a health spa, but Bad Things are going on there.
1962 detective fiction, first of James's novels of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. Sally Jupp the housemaid is found strangled in her bed, behind a bolted door. She'd managed to annoy pretty much everyone in the house… but who turned annoyance into murder?
1933 mystery, eighth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. Victor Dean, a copywriter at Pym's Publicity, fell down the office's iron spiral staircase and broke his neck. But his sister, with whom he was living, found a half-finished letter to the management that made her suspicious, and Wimsey goes in as a new copywriter to see what he can learn.
1992 mystery, second in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian police work). Over the winter of 1856-1857 in London, Monk is assigned to a new case: a young widow living in her father's house, found stabbed to death in her bed.
2011 historical mystery, first of a series. In Victorian London, Frances Doughty assists her ailing father in his pharmacy; but someone dies after drinking one of their tonics, and he's the obvious person to blame. But Frances is sure there must be more to the tale.
2018 SF/mystery; fifty-seventh (roughly, or 46th novel) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. A woman is stabbed while watching Psycho in a cinema; there's no obvious motive for killing her. Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas soon discovers roughly what's going on, but it'll still be a long twisty road to catching the killer.
1933 collection of twelve short mystery stories, some involving Lord Peter Wimsey.
1932 mystery, seventh of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. Harriet Vane, having turned her post-acquittal notoriety into a boost to her writing career, is taking a walking-tour on the south-west coast of England when she discovers a corpse on the beach, still dripping blood.
1931 mystery, sixth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. In Galloway, one fishes or one paints, ideally both; but one of the more offensive painter-fishermen has apparently fallen off a cliff. Wimsey is unconvinced.
1991 mystery; eleventh in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Out near the California-Nevada border, an environmental group is fighting the big mining company that's planning to reopen the old gold workings. But someone's playing dirty, and Sharon's brought in to find out what's going on.
1930 epistolary mystery, Sayers' only non-Wimsey crime novel. An expert on edible fungi dies after eating mushrooms he picked himself: the mistake that was bound to happen eventually? A dossier of evidence suggests otherwise.
2017 SF/mystery; fifty-sixth (roughly, or 45th novel) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas is out with a colleague when another patron of the bar is cut and bleeds to death in front of her. She may not have much time for gossip journalists, but solving murders is still her job.
2017 modern fantasy, seinen manga adaptation, 13 episodes: AniDB. Kobayashi the office worker gets drunk one night, and in the morning finds a dragon outside her front door – who's come to stay with her and be her maid. vt Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid.
1928 mystery, fourth of Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey. General Fentiman was found dead in his armchair at the club; but there's some question about the timing, since someone else died around the same time and there's a complex interaction of wills, and Lord Peter gets involved.
2007 historical detection short stories, in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia).
1928 collection of twelve short mystery stories involving Lord Peter Wimsey.
1927 mystery, third of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. While dining and talking about crime, Wimsey meets a doctor who's lost his practice because he was unhappy about a death (the patient was certainly dying, but should have lasted several more months) and insisted on an autopsy – to the horror of the country town where it happened. Nobody else thinks there's any possibility of a crime, but Wimsey takes an interest.
1984 cozy American detective fiction; fifth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. A minor theft is nothing to be taken seriously, but a murderous practical joke has more significance… and there's more murder to come.
2010-2011 mystery, light novel adaptation, 24 episodes: AniDB. In the European country of Sauville, Kujō the military brat transfers to an exclusive private school, and meets Victorique the goth-loli enigma. They solve crimes!
1926 mystery, second of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey's brother, the Duke of Denver, is accused of murdering his prospective brother-in-law. Why won't he say what he was doing in the conservatory at three in the morning?
1923 mystery, first of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. A body is found in a bath in Battersea, naked except for a pair of gold pince-nez; and a prominent financier has disappeared from his bed. Unless they're the same man, the cases don't appear to be connected, but Wimsey the amateur sleuth takes an interest in both ends of the affair.
2001 thriller/mystery; fourth of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. A private investigator tracks down Fran to tell her that her mother (who abandoned the family when Fran was quite young) is dying, and wants to talk to her. But that's not all she wants. It turns out that after she left she had another daughter…
1982 classic English detective fiction; thirty-second and last of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Peregrine Jay is putting on Macbeth at the Dolphin, but tensions are running high and not all the cast will make it to the end of the run.
1980 classic English detective fiction; thirty-first of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The Great Soprano is being pestered by a paparazzo; her millionaire friend takes her to a retreat in the New Zealand bush, with just a dozen good friends – including the young composer she's taken over, and whose new opera she's going to put on in a private performance. But all that's not going to stop someone from killing her.
1957 murder mystery in rural England. The Jeacocks have split off part of their house to make a cottage to let, but not only is their tenant entirely too willing to pay three months' rent in advance in lieu of references, he's mostly interested in the Big House nearby, and its new owner.
1979 detective fiction; fourth and last of Brand's novels of Inspector Charlesworth. On a stormy night, faded film star Sari Morne finds her road blocked by a fallen tree; but a stranger has just arrived at the other side, and they swap cars to finish their journeys. But the next morning the car in her garage has a corpse in it.
1978 classic English detective fiction; thirtieth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The wealthy double-widow Sybil Foster apparently commits suicide while staying in a hotel for hypochondriacs. But this is not a story about suicide. vt A Grave Mistake.
2005 mystery/thriller, first in a series. Dr Anya Crichton is a forensic pathologist (divorced, ex-husband has custody of the kid) trying to build a freelance practice as an expert witness. But several victims she examines have some unexpected findings in common.
1976 classic English detective fiction; twenty-ninth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Alleyn's son Rick is trying to write, staying in a rented room on a Channel Island. But while a riding accident might just be disturbing, it seems that murder is never far away. Fortunately, neither is his father.
1990 mystery; third in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). Mrs Pargeter keeps another recent widow company on a package holiday to Corfu, but clearly things are amiss even before the murder and the cover-up.
1973 classic English detective fiction; twenty-eighth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The president of newly-independent Ng'ombwana is visiting London; many years ago he was at school with Roderick Alleyn, and now he insists on having Alleyn involved in his security. Especially when there's an assassination attempt at his party in the embassy.
1983 cosy American detective fiction; fourth of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy, set at an agricultural college in Massachussetts. Retired professor Herbert Ungley wouldn't want to be caught dead without his toupee, but that's just what's happened.
2009 comedic mystery, first in its series. The nameless narrator runs No Alibis, a mystery bookshop in Belfast. But when the private detective agency next door suddenly closes down, some of its customers start coming to him instead.
1972 classic English detective fiction; twenty-seventh of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Troy is painting a portrait of Hilary Bill-Tasman, which means staying at his country house for Christmas. But a servant disappears in the storm, and Troy's husband is certain to be involved.
2007 historical mystery, fourth of Shaw's series. In 1898, Vanessa Weatherburn investigates a young woman whose body was found floating in the Cam.
1998 mystery; fourth of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, a teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham. Sophie's cousin Andy is a rock legend, planning to retire and devote himself to good causes; but it seems that someone wants him dead.
1970 classic English detective fiction; twenty-sixth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Various people have gathered for an expensive but exclusive tour of the sights of Rome; some of them are Bad Lots, and some of them will die.
1998 thriller; third of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be actress and amateur sleuth. Fran's working in her friend Ganesh's corner shop when a man stumbles in, obviously injured, then leaves once he's cleaned himself up a bit. But now sinister characters are hanging around the shop, and around Fran herself.
2017 SF/mystery; fifty-fifth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. (Or 44th novel, I think. At some point I may renumber these reviews.) On the road on a snowy night, Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband Roarke find a naked, blood-stained and delirious woman who claims to have been attacked by the Devil.
1968 classic English detective fiction; twenty-fifth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Worn down by having to be too much in public, Agatha Troy takes a river cruise in fen country. But nobody is quite what they seem, and soon one of them will be dead.
1988 mystery; second in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). Mrs Pargeter moves into one of a small cluster of new houses, but it seems that the previous occupant may have come to a bad end.
1990 mystery; tenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. A former student radical dies in one of a series of apparently random shootings. Shortly before his death, he changed his will, disinheriting his children and giving his money to four strangers. Sharon tracks them down, and tries to find out why he did it and whether there might have been any duress or undue inflence.
1967 classic English detective fiction; twenty-fourth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Playwright and director Peregrine Jay is handed the dilapidated Dolphin Theatre, and is making a success of it, at least until the night-watchman is murdered. US vt Killer Dolphin.
1990 mystery; first in Perry's William Monk series (Victorian police work). In 1856 London, Monk wakes up in hospital with no idea of his own name or job, but soon discovers that he's a police detective, and is given a new case to work on, the beating to death of a popular veteran of the Crimea. But as he finds out more about the man he used to be, he doesn't like him very much.
1986 mystery; first in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur sleuthing). Widowed Mrs Pargeter moves into a seaside hotel in Littlehampton, and causes a stir by being herself; but when one of the guests falls down the stairs in the middle of the night and breaks her neck, she may be the only person who doesn't assume it was an accident. Or at least one of two people.
1964 classic English detective fiction; twenty-third of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. An island village gets rich off tourism following the "miracle cure" that happened at its spring, but the new owner of the island plans to shut all that down. Murder ensues.
2016 SF/mystery; fifty-fourth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. A sniper is shooting people in New York – at random, or with specific targets in mind? Lieutenant Eve Dallas investigates.
1962 classic English detective fiction; twenty-second of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Friction in a pair of country houses is the precursor to murder, but everything's tangled in the extreme.
2006 historical detection, sixteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne is invited to a decadent Christmas party at Chirnside Manor; someone's trying to discredit and kill the hosts. She might not have gone, except that someone's sent her a coral snake to discourage her.
1960 classic English detective fiction; twenty-first of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The famous comedic actress Mary Bellamy has been getting increasingly troublesome, and now feels that all of her best friends have betrayed her. But only one of them is going to kill her.
2012 historical mystery novelette, part of Douglas's series about Irene Adler. Irene visits London and enlists the help of Sherlock Holmes to save an old friend from a complex blackmail plot.
1958 classic English detective fiction; twentieth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The passengers aboard the Cape Farewell are travelling to South Africa; but it seems that the Flower Murderer who's been plaguing London is among their number.
2004 historical mystery, eighth of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. Still in New York, Irene Adler looks into the last days of the woman who might have been her mother, and finds that other people are taking a violent interest in the matter.
1957 classic English detective fiction; nineteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. In the village of South Mardian, the Dance of the Five Sons is still performed at midwinter; but this year one of the dancers will be decapitated in truth as well as in jest. US vt Death of a Fool.
2006 historical mystery, third of Shaw's series. In 1896, Vanessa Weatherburn (now a mother of twins) investigates the murder of a professor of history at King's College.
1997 mystery; third of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, a teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham. Seconded to a new college for a project, Sophie finds the proximity to her home and the high equipment budget don't compensate for a strange managerial attitude… or for murder.
1955 classic English detective fiction; eighteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The quiet village of Swevenings has seen two deaths recently: Sir Harold Lacklander of the Foreign Service died of old age and heart failure, leaving his memoirs to his good friend and neighbour Colonel Cartarette to edit and publish. But now someone's stove the Colonel's head in.
1955 detective fiction; sixth and last of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. On a Conducted Tour (an early package holiday) in Italy, one of the group is murdered. Nobody has a strong motive, and everyone seems to have an alibi. But the local Grand Duke is determined to execute someone…
1996 detective fiction; eighth and apparently last of Cleeves's novels of amateur private detectives George and Molly Palmer-Jones. George is commissioned to look into a possible charity fraud, then whipped off to Texas to assist an old birdwatching friend who's being accused of murder.
1955 classic English detective fiction; fifteenth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Campion's friends and country neighbours the Cassands are having their annual party; but three corpses will go some way towards spoiling the fun.
2003 historical mystery, seventh of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. Goaded by the scandal-mongering reporter Nellie Bly, Irene travels back to New York to look into a past of which she has little memory… but someone seems to be killing people who figured in it.
1954 classic English detective fiction; seventeenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Alleyn is combining work for the Sûreté with a family holiday in the South of France, but sees a possible murder from the train, and then things get even more complicated. US vt The Bride of Death.
1990 mystery; ninth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Tracy Kostakos, rising comedian, disappeared two years ago; Bobby Foster confessed to kidnapping and killing her. But there's no body, he's recanted the confession, and All Souls Legal Cooperative is handling his appeal.
1989 collection of short mystery stories, some featuring Roderick Alleyn.
1952 detective fiction; fifth of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. Raoul Vernet, fading roué, had his head bashed in on a foggy night – in a nearly empty house. But everyone's got something to hide. US vt Fog of Doubt.
1952 classic English detective fiction; fourteenth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Meg Elginbrodde thought she was widowed in the war, and now plans to marry again; but someone is sending her recent photographs of a man who might be her late husband. Can it really be as simple as blackmail?
1997 mystery; second of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be actress and amateur sleuth. Fran's waiting at a station and feels sorry for a homeless man, so gives him a cup of coffee. Soon she's hearing his life story… and all about the young woman he saw being kidnapped a few days ago.
1951 classic English detective fiction; sixteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Towards the end of the opening night of a new play, one of the cast kills himself. Or does he? US vt Night at the Vulcan.
1987 partly-historical mystery. In 1910, Edwin Strafford was Home Secretary under Asquith, and engaged to be married; then, suddenly, his intended refused to speak to him, his political career collapsed, and he ended up as a consular official in Madeira. In 1977, unemployed history teacher Martin Radford is employed by an eccentric South African to find out why, but the past is not as dead as he might have hoped.
1976 comedic detective fiction; first of Thomas's novels of "Dangerous" Davies, barely-competent and perenially unlucky detective constable in Willesden. Set to look for a local criminal who might have returned to the area, Davies turns this into an investigation of a twenty-five-year-old disappearance.
1949 classic English detective fiction; fifteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Lord Pastern and Bagott, sitting in on the drums in a jazz band, has set up a bit of business where he "shoots" the piano-accordionist, Carlos Rivera, who falls down and is carried off stage. But Rivera's made himself offensive to everyone, and he's not going to be getting up again. US vt A Wreath for Rivera.
1949 detective fiction; fourth of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. Isabel Drew is domineering, vain, and thoughtless, but beautiful enough to get away with it. Today her chickens will be coming home to roost.
2005 historical detection, fifteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). After a series of jewel thefts aboard the SS Hinemoa, Phryne is employed by P&O as both detective and bait.
2005 historical epistolary mystery, second of Shaw's series. In 1892, a young woman's much older husband has been murdered; her mother brings in Vanessa Duncan to try to get the answers and avoid scandal before the police arrest the widow.
1948 classic English detective fiction; thirteenth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The decaying Palinodes are lodging in what used to be the family house, but one of them seems to have been poisoned; what is the neighbouring undertaker up to; and why is a delirious crook terrified of "going up Apron Street"?
1944 mystery; eighth of Daly's books of Henry Gamadge, book expert and amateur investigator. Mr Crenshaw arrived in New York, settled his affairs and died of leukemia, with no relatives to be informed; but a casual acquaintance didn't like the look of his servant, and asks Gamadge to dig into the matter.
1947 classic English detective fiction; fourteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Agatha Troy is commissioned to paint a portrait of Sir Henry Ancred, famed Shakespearian actor; the house is full of his variously ghastly family, including the chorus-girl he's taken up with.
2003 somewhat parodic cosy detective fiction; third and last of Anderson's novels of the Earl of Burford and Inspector Wilkins. The last two house parties at Alderley ended in murder, but surely there can't be any harm in having people down for Great-Aunt Flossie's funeral and the reading of her will?
1997 mystery; first of Granger's novels of Fran Varady. Fran is unemployed, broke, and about to be turfed out of her London squat along with her three housemates. But one of those housemates is soon going to turn up dead.
1937 detective fiction; third of Heyer's novels of Detective Inspector, later Superintendent, Hannasyde and Sergeant Hemingway. Silas Kane is found at the foot of a cliff on the morning after his sixtieth birthday party; obviously he slipped. But then his heir is quite blatantly shot, and attempts are made on the life of the next heir.
1946 detective fiction; third of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. Sir Richard's grandchildren visit his country house in the summer of 1944 as flying-bombs descend on London; he decides to disinherit them all, goes to spend the night in the lodge dedicated to the memory of his deceased first wife, and is found dead in the morning. US vt The Crooked Wreath.
2004 historical detection, fourteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne investigates a disappeared "fast" girl, and one of her adopted daughters tries to find her original father. But will Phryne manage to appear as Queen of the Flowers at the St Kilda Festival? Of course she will.
1943 mystery, ninth in Innes' John Appleby series. At Nestfield University, Professor Pluckrose is found dead in his deck-chair on the Green, crushed by a meteorite; surely not an accident, and Appleby investigates.
2002 historical mystery, sixth of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. Following the events of Chapel Noir, our protagonists variously head east to put an end to the Ripper mystery.
1945 classic English detective fiction; thirteenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Florence Rubrick, sheep station owner and local MP, vanished one night from her home; her body was found some weeks later, packed into a bale of wool. Eighteen months later, Alleyn is hunting for spies in New Zealand, and informally takes on the case.
2004 historical epistolary mystery. In Cambridge in 1888, a young schoolmistress tries to solve the murders of three mathematicians before her beau is convicted of them.
2001 historical mystery, fifth of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. In Paris in 1889, the Exposition Universelle is in full swing… but a notorious killer seems to have come over from London.
2009 mystery, fifteenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. After the events of the last book, Anna's on administrative leave; she travels with her husband to the Rio Grande for a rafting trip. They come across a nearly-dead, very pregnant woman; and apparently someone wants to finish the job.
1945 classic English detective fiction; twelfth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Back in London after three years overseas on mysterious war work, Campion just wants to catch a train; but Lugg and an unknown lady turn up in his flat with a corpse. US vt Pearls Before Swine.
1943 classic English detective fiction; twelfth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. At a run-down hot-springs resort in the back country of New Zealand, one guest seems to be going out of his way to offend everyone; then he vanishes.
1941 (some sources say 1942) classic English detective fiction; eleventh of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. For his own amusement, Jonathan Royal invites six mortal enemies to a party at his house in Dorset. Really, the first surprise is that he isn't murdered.
1940 classic English detective fiction; tenth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The Lampreys are an impoverished aristocratic family; after Lord Charles's rich brother refused to give them yet another handout, he was found stabbed to death. Mad wife? Annoyed brother? Random stranger? Well, it'll never be that last in a classic mystery. US vt Death of a Peer.
1996 mystery; second of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham and part-time chorister. Sophie goes on a residential writing course; one of her fellow students dies, and a tutor goes missing.
1941 detective fiction; second of Brand's novels, and first to feature Inspector Cockrill. A visitor to a country house says "I wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch in a [hat] like that"… and is soon proved wrong. The next night another woman is murdered.
1994 detective fiction; seventh of Cleeves's novels of amateur private detectives George and Molly Palmer-Jones. Jimmy Morrissey was the public voice of environmentalism and conservation, but killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants. Or did he?
1941 detective fiction; first of Brand's novels, and first to feature Inspector Charlesworth. One of the senior staff of a London dress-shop dies of poison; her co-workers are the only plausible suspects.
2000 mystery, third in Whitelaw's Jordan Lacey series. Jordan takes on a job following a woman suspected of compensation fraud against the local department store, and then tries to track down vanishing stock in the run-up to Christmas. And of course there's also a murder.
1940 classic English detective fiction; eleventh of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. An amnesiac Campion knows he was in the middle of dealing with a truly serious plot… but what is it all about, and whom can he trust? US vt The Sabotage Murder Mystery.
1989 mystery; eighth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's assigned to follow Frank Wilkinson as he spends his Sunday going round the horticultural high spots of San Francisco. But her client's obviously lying about why he wants the job done, and soon he ends up dead.
1940 classic English detective fiction; ninth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. In an isolated village in Devon, a game of darts at the pub ends in death. Accidental? Surely not.
1981 mystery, first of Caudwell's Hilary Tamar series. A young barrister, Julia, is taking a tour in Venice; she gets a gorgeous young man to bed, and a few hours later he's found dead, stabbed, with her copy of the Finance Act next to the body.
1939 classic English detective fiction; eighth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Miss Campanula was killed by a booby-trapped piano, but was she really the intended victim?
1975 historical detective fiction; sixth of Lovesey's novels of Sergeant Cribb, policeman in Victorian London. Two thefts during séances conducted by the latest fashionable medium attract the attention of the police, but when the next séance ends in a death, mere spiritualism is clearly not the only deception going on.
1975 detective fiction; sixth of Aird's novels of Inspector Sloan and Constable Crosby. Bill Fent, local landowner, died when his car hit another at a notorious corner… but he'd have been dead before morning anyway, from the poison in his system.
1939/1950 collection of short mystery stories featuring Albert Campion.
1975 detective fiction; first of Dexter's novels of Inspector Morse. Two young women wait for the bus out of Oxford one night; one goes to hitch a ride, and her dead body is found the next day.
1995 mystery; first of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, a teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham. Finding one of her students stabbed to death in the lift is bad enough; when her best friend dies in a way that seems plausibly accidental except to people who knew him well, Sophie knows she'll have to look into the situation herself.
1975 detective fiction; first of Brett's novels of Charles Paris, ageing actor. A friend and occasional lover of Charles's has been dumped by her current sugar daddy, and she asks him to return some compromising photographs. But getting in touch is going to be something of a challenge.
1938 classic English detective fiction; seventh of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Someone's blackmailing London's high society as the Season begins, and Alleyn asks a friend who moves in those circles to look into it; murder will be done.
2011 historical mystery; fourth in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. As Christmas approaches, Buckshaw is let to a film crew who'll be making The Cry of the Raven, starring the famous Phyllis Wyvern. But not all of the company will be leaving again.
1938 classic English detective fiction; sixth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. At an informal residential art school, the model has been murdered – by a method all the students had talked about some days before.
2011 historical mystery; third in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. A missing baby, an assault on a Gypsy (sic) fortune-teller, and a murder in Flavia's own home will all turn out to be connected.
1907 mystery. Mlle Stangerson, daughter of the famous scientist, locked herself into her bedroom… then came the sound of a struggle, shouts of "Murder", and gunfire. When her father broke down the door, she was seriously injured and the only person there – and the window-bars had not been moved.
1938 classic English detective fiction; tenth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Georgia Wells, actress and femme fatale, attracts men like moths. But somehow, just as they start to get troublesome, they seem to die. Is Georgia less silly, and more dangerous, than she appears?
2010 historical mystery; second in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. Rupert Porson, the famous puppeteer (at least to those who have televisions), was passing through the village of Bishop's Lacey when his van broke down; since he's stuck there overnight, he might as well put on a show. But it's all going to go horribly wrong.
1981 somewhat parodic cosy detective fiction; second of Anderson's novels of the Earl of Burford and Inspector Wilkins. After the last one, the Earl swore off house-parties, but it seems it's all happening again. Including the murder.
2009 historical mystery; first in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. Flavia, one of three daughters of the widowed and impoverished Colonel de Luce, lives in Buckshaw, makes chemical experiments… and finds a body in the cucumber patch. Naturally, she investigates.
1937 classic English detective fiction; fifth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. This time he's on holiday in New Zealand, sharing an overnight train with a touring theatrical troupe also from England, when the manager says that someone's tried to murder him. The next day, someone will succeed.
1982 mystery; second in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. One of Sharon's neighbours in her apartment building is strangled, and it looks worryingly as if Sharon's house-guest, who's prone to alcoholic amnesia, might have done it.
2008 mystery, fourteenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Anna returns to Isle Royale, this time in winter, to join the wolf/moose wildlife study; it's disrupted by an observer from Homeland Security, who clearly has a brief to shut it down and instead open the park in winter to "beef up security". Then traces of an unexpected large predator show up. Then people start to die.
1977 mystery; first in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's been looking into arson and vandalism on a street of junk and antique shops that's in the crosshairs of gentrification. But now one of the shop owners has been fatally stabbed.
1937 classic English detective fiction; ninth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Campion is called to the village of Kepesake as the recent rich incomer has clearly been murdered… but when Campion sees the body, he realises he went to the same man's funeral five months earlier.
1994 historical detection, sixth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne goes undercover in a circus to try to find out who's sabotaging it; and a performer who's moved on from it is accused of murder.
1993 historical detection, fifth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). During a dance competition at the Green Mill, a figure slumps to the ground. Was he the target of his attacker – or was it Phryne? And why has her partner for the evening bolted?
1937 classic English detective fiction; eighth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Someone's playing silly pranks on Jimmy Sutane, star of a successful musical; he invites Campion to look into it. But then one of Sutane's house-guests dies: accident, suicide, murder? Later US vt Who Killed Chloe?.
1992 historical detection, fourth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). As Phryne is driving home one night, someone shoots out her windscreen. As the gunfight moves on, she gets out of the car to find an injured young man, who dies in her arms.
1991 historical detection, third in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Everyone in one of the carriages on the overnight train to Ballarat is chloroformed; Phryne retains just enough consciousness to shoot out the window and let in some air. When everyone recovers, it's found that an elderly passenger has vanished. But why?
1936 classic English detective fiction; fourth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. At a meeting of the House of the Sacred Flame, a small cult, the Chosen Vessel drinks from the Flaming Cup, gabbles nonsensically, and dies of a dose of sodium cyanide.
1990 historical detection, second in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne takes on the case of a son whose mother is worried he'll murder his father, and then the father is indeed murdered; and she tracks down a kidnapped child.
1989 historical detection, first in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Intelligent, beautiful, rich, and bored, the Hon. Phryne Fisher travels to Australia in order to find out whether John Andrews is poisoning his wife, her clients' daughter.
1930 classic English detective fiction; fifth of Sayers's novels of Lord Peter Wimsey. Philip Boyes, writer on atheism, anarchy and free love, died of quite a lot of arsenic; Harriet Vane, who had lived with him without benefit of clergy for nearly a year until they had quarrelled three months earlier, is accused of having poisoned him. Wimsey, seeing the trial, is convinced of her innocence, not to say smitten by her; when the jury cannot agree on a verdict, he makes it his business to save her from the gallows in the month before the new trial.
1988 mystery; seventh in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's sister Patsy has a new boyfriend, and a renovation project in the Sacramento Delta. But someone's playing tricks, sabotaging the project and scaring off the workers; Sharon takes a long weekend away from her job to help Patsy out.
2008 mystery; ninth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude drops into the local betting shop to take shelter from a sudden hailstorm; another customer staggers out, and turns up stabbed in an alley nearby.
2007 mystery; eighth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Carole always has her hair cut at Connie's Clip Joint, "same shape, but shorter". This time, Kyra, one of the juniors, hasn't turned up, and she turns out to have been left dead in the back room, strangled with the cord of a hair-dryer.
1936 classic English detective fiction; seventh of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The Barnabas family publishing house is used to strangeness; the founder's nephew disappeared in broad daylight while walking between his house and the main road. Now Paul Brande, one of the cousins who run the firm, is found dead inside a locked room. US vt Legacy in Blood.
2006 mystery; seventh in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude's been asked to extend her healing practice to a horse; but she doesn't expect to find the co-owner of the stables stabbed to death. Obviously it was the local "Horse Ripper", caught in the act. Or was it a jealous husband?
2005 mystery; sixth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Carole's son is getting married, but the bride's parents are oddly reluctant to have any announcements made… and then the father is strangled.
1935 classic English detective fiction; third of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. In a private hospital, the Home Secretary was operated on for appendicitis: shortly afterwards he was dead, poisoned with hyoscine (scopolamine). And all sorts of people seem to have had motives.
2004 mystery; fifth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude is helping out at the Hopwicke Country House Hotel, but the morning after a boozy meeting of the Pillars of Sussex, an organisation of local businessmen, one of them doesn't come down to breakfast… because he's hanging from a beam of his four-poster bed. Obviously a suicide…
2003 historical detection, thirteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne investigates a mummified corpse found in a carnival attraction.
2003; fourth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Bracketts, an Elizabethan house, is to be turned into a museum celebrating the life and work of the local poet Esmond Chadleigh, its most famous resident. Then a skull is dug up in the garden.
2015 mystery novel adaptation, 11 episodes: AniDB, vt "Everything Becomes F" or "The Perfect Insider". Shiki Magata killed her parents when she was fourteen, but her mind was clearly disturbed, and she's a brilliant programmer; for the fifteen years since then, she's been confined to a few rooms within a research lab, with extremely restricted communication with the outside world. And yet, someone has managed to murder her.
2002 mystery; third in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). The couple who've just moved into the Big House in Fedborough, inland up the river from Fethering, throw a dinner party to try to get into the local social scene… which is somewhat spoiled when a limbless body is discovered in the cellar.
1935 classic English detective fiction; second of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. When Arthur Surbonadier is fatally shot on stage during the last act of The Rat and the Beaver, there's no question about who pulled the trigger: the shooting was part of the play. But there wasn't supposed to be live ammunition in the gun.
2001 mystery; second in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). While out exploring the South Downs, Carole stumbles on a human skeleton. Jude thinks she knows who it might have been.
2000 mystery; first in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Carole Seddon, conventional, divorced, and retired from the Home Office, moves to the small seaside town of Fethering (inspired by the real Tarring in West Sussex). But her neighbour Jude turns out to be distressingly bohemian, and she finds a dead body while walking her dog on the beach… but by the time the police turn up, it's gone.
1993 detective fiction; fifth of Cleeves's novels of amateur private detectives George and Molly Palmer-Jones. Elderly Ursula Ottway lives in a cottage on an estate in the Cumbrian fell country; when she finds her cats dead from eating poisoned bait, she threatens to expose her landlord, rising politician Marcus Grenville, since he's obviously been illegally poisoning raptors to improve the grouse shooting. The next day she's dead. But she was Molly's aunt, and George and Molly were on their way to visit.
2016 SF/mystery; fifty-third (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Dennis Mira went to confront his cousin Edward over plans to sell the family house, but found him tied up in a chair; then someone knocked Dennis on the head. Now Edward's missing. Fortunately Dennis is married to Charlotte Mira, police profiler and friend of Lieutenant Eve Dallas.
2000 mystery, eighth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Newly promoted to District Ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway, Anna finds herself the object of resentment by her time-serving underlings, then discovers the body of a young woman (who "had accrued a surprising number of reasons to be done to death for a girl of her tender years").
1999 mystery, seventh in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. With her sister hospitalised in New York, Anna stays on Liberty Island (where the statue is) and explores Ellis Island outside hospital visiting hours. Then a young girl falls to her death from the statue.
1934 classic English detective fiction; sixth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The great artist John Lafcadio left twelve final paintings, to be shown one per year after his death. At the unveiling of the eighth, a young artist is fatally stabbed with a pair of decorative scissors.
1998 mystery, sixth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Lechugilla Cavern is a huge and largely unexplored cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park; when a friend and fellow ranger is injured there, Anna swallows her claustrophobia and goes in to help with the evacuation.
1997 mystery, fifth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. After the events of the previous book, Anna's sent to Cumberland Island Park for "pre-suppression" fire duty, and a bit of a lighter posting. But she and another ranger spot a plume of smoke, which turns out to be the fresh wreckage of the island's drug-interdiction plane.
1933 classic English detective fiction; fifth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The Fitton family operate a run-down watermill in Suffolk, but may be the forgotten heirs of Averna, a tiny European principality that may suddenly be terribly important. US vtt Kingdom of Earth and The Fear Sign.
1996 mystery, fourth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Anna's called in to help fight a wildfire in Lassen Volcanic National Park, but the wind shifts and a firestorm overtakes the team. When they come out of their protective tents, one of them's been stabbed in the back.
1995 mystery, third in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Visitors to Mesa Verde Park and the Anasazi cliff dwellings have been coming away with a strange and deadly illness.
1931 classic English detective fiction; fourth of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The very elderly Caroline Faraday has a house in Cambridge run on strict Victorian lines; her ageing son, daughters and nephew put up with the lack of freedom for the free bed and board, having variously failed at their own lives. But everyone's fairly horrible, and it seems that one of them is also a murderer.
1944 detective fiction; second of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. At a military hospital during the Blitz, a patient dies under anæsthetic. Later, someone who'd claimed to know who was responsible is stabbed to death. Six suspects are left, and there's not a visible motive among them.
1994 mystery, second in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. In the Isle Royale park off the Michigan coast, one of the dive operators turns up dead in a long-sunken shipwreck.
1993 mystery, first in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. After the death of her husband, Anna fled from her life in New York to find solitude as a ranger in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, home to a few mountain lions among other species. But when a colleague is found dead, the paw prints round the body and claw marks on the throat seem to point a little too perfectly to a killer animal.
1931 classic English detective fiction; third of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. The Gyrth Chalice is unique and unsaleable… but it seems that someone is setting up to steal it anyway, for a private collection. US vt The Gyrth Chalice Mystery.
1930 classic English detective fiction; second of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. Multiple attempts have been made to murder an American judge; Campion does his best to keep him safe.
2001 mystery, second in Whitelaw's Jordan Lacey series (private investigation in a small seaside town). Jordan investigates stolen water-lilies, vandalism, theft of a wedding cake, arson, and an errant husband. Oh, and a Second World War aircraft wreck.
1929 classic English detective fiction; first of Allingham's novels of Albert Campion. George Abbershaw, expert pathologist who unexpectedly finds himself in love, goes down for the weekend to the remote country house called "Black Dudley"; but the gathering is afflicted with murder… and then taken over by gangsters. US vt The Black Dudley Murder.
The mystery story when done well is an extreme form of the story problem, which one can enjoy both on the level of normal fiction with characters and plot and setting and so on and on the level of working out whodunnit before the author reveals the solution.
1931 English detective fiction, in fourteen chapters by fourteen authors. The body of retired Admiral Penistone is found in a small boat on the river, stabbed through the heart. Everyone has a story, and everyone has something to hide.
2015 SF/mystery novella; fifty-second (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series, published as part of Down the Rabbit Hole, a multi-author anthology of stories loosely inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Apparently Darlene Fitzwilliams fatally stabbed her brother, then jumped off his fifty-second floor balcony. But there's no sign that she was the sort of person who'd do that.
1934 classic English detective fiction; first of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. At Sir Hubert Handesley's country house weekend, five guests play a game of "Murder". But when the lights come up…
1983, cozy American detective fiction; fourth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah and Max, teetering on the brink of getting engaged, visit Sarah's summer home on Cape Cod. But someone has covertly added a valuable antique mirror to the furnishings; and a nasty old gossip turns up with an axe in her chest.
2015 mystery novel adaptation, 12 episodes: AniDB, vt "Beautiful Bones: Sakurako`s Investigation" or "A Corpse is Buried Under Sakurako's Feet". Kujou Sakurako, osteologist and amateur forensic anthropologist, investigates the remarkable number of human bones to be found locally.
2014; fifteenth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing in small-town Sussex). After a rehearsal for a village-hall production of The Devil's Disciple, the lead is found strangled on the "absolutely safe" gallows.
1985 mystery; sixth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Someone's causing minor troubles for the inhabitants of a hotel in the Tenderloin, most of them recent Vietnamese immigrants; Sharon's employed by the Refugee Assistance Committee to look into it. Then things turn deadly.
1994 mystery, fourth of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler; here she returns to Prague, to solve a problem for the Queen. Espionage, the Golem, femmes fatales, and really nice dresses ensue. (Retitled as Another Scandal in Bohemia in recent reissue.)
2015 SF/mystery; fifty-first (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Two serial killers have crossed the USA and landed in New York; Lieutenant Eve Dallas tracks them down.
Contemporary fantasy, fourth in the series. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and magician, looks into a number of cases that seem to be tying back to a Brutalist tower block in Southwark.
2009 mystery, third in the series. Constable "Thorny" Deepbriar goes to the local seaside town while his broken leg finishes healing, but he can't leave detection alone. Not only is someone stealing garden gnomes, but a body found on the beach is someone Deepbriar thought had died when he was a very green copper sixteen years ago during the war.
2016 supernatural mystery, sixth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A police raid following a tip-off about a brothel goes wrong: there's sex being had, but it all seems to have been consenting swingers, except for one registered sex offender. Then people start dying.
2002 historical detection, twelfth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne looks into trouble at a French restaurant, the disappearance of a young woman, and the murder of old soldiers.
Collection of six short mystery stories from 1902-1903. Madame Sara, the best "beautifier" in London, is also a master criminal – one might even say a veritable Napoleon of crime.
2005 mystery, thirteenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. In Rocky Mountain, three young girls went missing a few months back, and were never found. But now two of them have walked out of the woods…
1992 mystery, third of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. In Paris in 1888, a stranger in Oriental garb falls poisoned at the feet of Irene's narrator, Nell Huxleigh. But why does he claim to know her? (Retitled A Soul of Steel in recent reissue.)
1997 humorous detective fiction; first of Alcorn's novels of Norman de Ratour, Recording Secretary at the Museum of Man, an anthropological museum somewhere in New England. Dean Fessing goes missing, and most of him turns up expertly cooked. That inevitably starts rumours of cannibalism, but there may be fire to go with this smoke…
2011 detective fiction parody, collection of seven short stories. Colonel Sebastian Moran, a cad and a bounder, works for Professor Moriarty the consulting criminal.
1993 detective fiction; sixth of Cleeves's novels of amateur private detectives George and Molly Palmer-Jones. On a bird-watching boat trip, the sighting of a rare petrel is much more interesting than a birdwatcher who isn't where he should be. But then he turns out to have been murdered...
1975 cosy detective fiction; first of Anderson's novels of the Earl of Burford and Inspector Wilkins. Some time in the 1930s, there's a house party at Alderley, including the Earl's political brother and the foreign dignitaries he's negotiating with, an American millionaire called Hiram, and various others. Nobody is quite what they seem, and that's even before jewels start going missing and guests start turning up dead.
1980 historical mystery. In 1327, Friar William of Baskerville and his novice Adso of Melk try to solve a series of murders at a monastery in northern Italy.
2009 mystery, the tenth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. After a Civil War battle re-enactment on Lansdown Hill near Bath, one of the soldiers disappears. Later the police find a headless skeleton in the same area. Later still, a homeless man is found dead with a major head wound. Are the cases connected? DI Peter Diamond is determined that they are.
2006 alternate-history mystery, first in the "Small Change" trilogy. In 1949, Britain is at peace with the Reich, which is still fighting in Russia. At Farthing, a country house in Hampshire, one of the architects of that peace is murdered. Jews and Bolshevists are immediately blamed, but Inspector Carmichael thinks it's more complicated than that.
1991 mystery, second of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler. Bored in Paris, Irene takes on the mystery of a series of tattooed suicides. (Retitled The Adventuress in recent reissue.)
1982 cosy American detective fiction; third of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy, set at an agricultural college in Massachussetts. Hilda Horsefall is 105 years old and still keeping the family farm going, until her farmhand is horribly murdered. But is it just part of a land-grab, and if so who's trying to do it? And how is the Viking runestone on her land connected to everything?
2011; fourteenth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude's new lover Piers is a tennis fanatic – real tennis – but when she turns up for a lesson one of the other club members is found dead. Heart attack, clearly, but why is everyone acting so cagey? Meanwhile Jude's friend Carole conducts a separate investigation.
2004 mystery, twelfth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. After four seasonal park employees disappear on the same day in Yosemite, Anna Pigeon goes undercover to try to find out what happened.
2015 supernatural mystery, fifth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. In a network of man-made caves under Edinburgh, a journalist turns up with his throat cut. Why there, why then, and why him?
1982, cozy American detective fiction; third of MacLeod's novels of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. At a private art museum, a guard falls to his death, having been complaining that his favourite Rubens is different these days.
1984 mystery; sixth-ish in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco, and at the same time fourteenth in Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" private eye series. Both detectives are at a convention of private eyes in San Diego, McCone also visiting her family and an old friend who's now head of hotel security. But then the dying starts.
2008 mystery, second of the "Thorny" Deepbriar series. In rural Yorkshire in 1957, Thorny the village bobby is still trying to get into the CID. But his superiors want him walking the beat where he is. He'll need to pull off an impressive feat of detection, but how can he do that in a village where nothing much happens?
2014 SF/mystery; forty-ninth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Just before Christmas, a personal trainer is found in his home, with a nasty head wound and a knife in his chest. He seems to have been a thoroughly nasty person, but for Eve Dallas the homicide cop's job is still the job.
2001 historical detection, eleventh in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Miss Lavender, an author and illustrator of overly-twee fairy stories, has died after receiving threatening letters. Phryne is called in by the police as someone who might be able to spot something amiss in the sea of cuteness that is Miss Lavender's home, and finds rather more motives than anyone could reasonably have expected.
1981, cozy American detective fiction; second of MacLeod's novels of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. While the family affairs get straightened out, the recently-widowed Sarah needs an income; she remodels her house to take in boarders. But one of them falls under a subway train, or maybe he was pushed…
2000 mystery, first in Whitelaw's Jordan Lacey series. Asthmatic ex-policewoman Jordan Lacey starts a private investigation business in the seaside town of Latching, West Sussex. Will there be enough work to pay the bills? Surprisingly, yes.
1990, first of Douglas's novels about Irene Adler, opera singer, adventuress, and foil to Sherlock Holmes.
2003 mystery, eleventh in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. At Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles off the end of Florida, Anna replaces a chief ranger who went mad. A boat explosion and anonymous body parts are troubling enough; but then Anna starts to see ghosts…
2008 mystery. A woman is found on the beach at Selsey, drowned – forcibly. But she isn't going to be the only victim.
1981, cosy American detective fiction; second of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy, set at an agricultural college in Massachussetts. A few days before the Annual Competition of the Balaclava County Draft Horse Association, the college's farrier has been murdered. And the prize pig has gone missing. Is it a school prank gone horribly wrong, or something more sinister?
2014 supernatural mystery, fourth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A body is found in the North Esk, dead of a fall, and tattooed all over. A prominent politician shoots his wife and children, then himself. Tony McLean is more interested in the former, but gets the latter on his plate as well.
2007 mystery, the ninth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. A woman is found hanged in a park in Bath; a few days later her partner turns up in the same state. A suicide pact?
1981, cosy American detective fiction; first of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Dittany Henbit and the Lobelia Falls Grub-and-Stakers Gardening & Roving Club. In a small town in Ontario, the local villain has a plan to build houses on a wilderness area. But one of his patsies ends up shot.
1981, cosy American detective fiction; second of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. In a remote country house in Canada, old Granny Condrycke has died peacefully in her sleep. With the house cut off, the family decides to go ahead with Christmas festivities. But Madoc Rhys, a Mountie who's there accidentally undercover with his fiancée Janet, reckons there was more to it.
2012 historical detection, fourth in Dean's Dido Kent series. Dido is forced to act as companion to her elderly and wealthy aunt, but the house they visit has its own problems: a young lady has disappeared, perhaps to Gretna Green, but her guardian is curiously unconcerned about her.
1998 lesbian noir mystery/romance; first in Griffith's series about Aud Torvingen, bodyguard and borderline psychopath in Atlanta. An art historian's house is burned to the ground, with him in it; six kilos of cocaine are found in the garage. A drug-related execution, or something odder?
1984 mystery; fifth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. A major player in the flea-markets wants help dealing with a stalker, but his business is not as honest as it could be, and soon people start turning up dead.
2012 mystery, twelfth in King's series about Mary Russell, wife of Sherlock Holmes. In Morocco in 1924, rebellion is in the air, and fell plots with international ramifications are being prepared.
2014 mystery, third in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. Bodies are found hanging in their homes in Edinburgh, apparently suicides. But how did they all come to do it in just the same way at the same time?
2010 historical detection, third in Dean's Dido Kent series. On a visit to a supposedly-haunted ruined abbey, a young lady slips and falls, saying in her delirium only "I saw her – it was her". Was it the Grey Nun of legend?
1999 historical detection. Tenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne is in Sydney, nominally to watch a cricket match, at the request of two university students, whose friend has been accused of stealing exam-papers: an obvious setup. But it seems that there's more to it than that.
2010 mystery, seventeenth in the series about Kate Shugak, part-time private investigator in a national park in Alaska. The gold mine has come to the Park, and that's changing everything; but murder is still murder.
2011; thirteenth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Jude and Carole go to a private viewing by a consciously controversial artist at a local gallery, but the evening ends in violent death. The police reckon it's suicide, but…
2013 cosy mystery, fifth in Bradley's series set in the early 1950s about child detective Flavia de Luce. The corpse of the angelic-looking young organist has been hidden in a saint's tomb that hasn't been opened for years. But how and why did he die?
2014 urban fantasy, sequel to London Falling. As protests brew into riots during a hot summer, important people are being murdered in a bizarre and impossible way. Fortunately, the Met has four officers who specialise in the impossible.
2009 historical detection, second in Dean's Dido Kent series. Rich invalid Mrs Lansdale has died, of an overdose of laudanum. Her nephew stands to inherit. But did he do it?
2012 mystery, first in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A prominent city elder in Edinburgh is killed, but less than a day later his killer commits a public and messy suicide. Case closed, and the police are happy. But McLean won't let it lie, especially when the same thing happens again.
1980, cosy American detective fiction; first of MacLeod's novels of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. In Boston, an old family vault is opened for the first time in thirty years… to reveal the corpse of a well-known burlesque dancer.
2007 mystery. In rural Yorkshire in 1956, Constable "Thorny" Deepbriar is a village bobby who's always longed to try his hand at detection. Now he's going to get his chance.
2005 mystery. A publisher's house is burned down, with him in it. What's the connection with the local circle of unpublished writers?
2008 historical detection, first in Dean's Dido Kent series. In 1805 at Richard Montague's engagement party, he suddenly puts off his fiancée Catherine and leaves for parts unknown. And a woman's body is found in the shrubbery. Catherine's spinster aunt Dido tries to clear up the mystery. US vt Bellfield Hall.
2013 urban fantasy. Rhian, a young woman from the valleys with some unusual talents, finds herself in east London, where ancient magics are mixing with modern in a distinctly unpleasant way.
1997 historical detection. Ninth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). A man drops dead of strychnine poisoning in a bookshop; the owner's the obvious suspect. But Phryne is unconvinced.
2012 mystery, second in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. Twelve years ago Tony McLean caught the Christmas Killer, whose last victim was McLean's fiancée. Now that man's been killed in prison, but another young woman's corpse has just turned up, killed in the same way. A copycat? Or did McLean get the wrong man?
2015 SF/mystery; fiftieth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death series. At the end of 2060, Homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas comes up against a new threat: a murderer who's such a fan that he's killing people who've offended Dallas. And there are a lot of them.
2003 mystery, the eighth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. Is a killing on a beach connected with the murder of a celebrity film director?
2012 urban fantasy. The big crime boss is finally arrested, curiously easily, but explodes in a shower of blood while he's being interviewed. In trying to work out what happened, four coppers accidentally step into a much larger world.
1980, cosy American detective fiction; first of MacLeod's novels (as "Alisa Craig") of Madoc and Janet Rhys. In a small Canadian town, the local old biddy has died of eating her own contaminated preserves. But was she really that careless?
2009 historical mystery. In Boston in 1773, Abigail Adams (wife of lawyer and future president John Quincy Adams) tries to solve the murder of one woman and the disappearance of another.
1868 mystery; often considered the first detective novel in English. The huge diamond, looted from India, goes missing after a birthday party. Who took it? And how was the trick managed?
2011; twelfth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). Carole Seddon takes over the rental of a beach hut along the shore from Fethering, only for human remains to turn up underneath it.
1949 mystery. Simon Ashby is about to come of age and inherit the family estate Latchetts (sadly fallen, but still worth a bit). Eight years ago, after the sudden death of their parents, his older twin Patrick committed suicide, or so everyone thought; but now someone claiming to be Patrick has turned up to take over again.
1979, cosy American detective fiction; first of MacLeod's novels of Professor Peter Shandy. In a New England agricultural college, the local busybody has had an accident, or been murdered. But was it really over the question of Christmas decorations?
Contemporary fantasy. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and magician, investigates the death of a man found stabbed on Baker Street station.
2005 SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant software, looks into the affairs of a techie who's been hit by a car and is now in intensive care. Was it an accident?
1997; third of Hayter's mysteries about TV journalist Robin Hudson. Robin's just trying to find her intern and other co-workers for a girls' night out, but somehow it doesn't seem to come together.
2004 SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant software, follows up on a lead to an old enemy.
1984; fourth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. McCone investigates the disappearance of a famous photographer's roommate, which leads to secret goings-on in a decaying coastal town.
2003 SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant software, has just lost a friend and employee: he's been murdered. The police reckon it was random drug-related violence; she tries to find out more.
1907; romantic melodrama-cum-mystery story. Who killed Robert Courthope? Why did Philip Warren flee from the scene?
Sixth mystery starring Meg Lanslow, contemporary blacksmith. Meg and her boyfriend have bought a huge old house very cheaply, on condition that they clear out and sell the accumulated junk left by the previous owner. But during the sale, a dubious dealer in antiquities turns up dead…
Tenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National Parks. Back on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, a body's been found in an old plantation house, left in a manner suggestive of sexual homicide.
Contemporary fantasy. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and magician, investigates the sudden deaths of jazz musicians.
Eleventh in King's series about Mary Russell, who… well, this is basically Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, but against all the odds it manages to work. Strange things have been happening around a film crew; Russell joins it to work out what's going on.
Third in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. McCone investigates the murder of a painter and decorator in a rough area that's being gentrified.
Second of Hayter's mysteries about TV journalist Robin Hudson. This time her new gynæcologist has been found, handcuffed and then shot in the head, and there's no shortage of people who might have wished him ill.
Sixteenth mystery in the series about Kate Shugak, part-time private investigator in a national park in Alaska. Gold's been found on park lands, and that means mining, and that means objections from the locals. The mining company's hired a minor celebrity to be their spokeswoman. But that doesn't solve everything.
Novella; eleventh in Lippman's contemporary mystery series about Tess Monaghan, private investigator in Baltimore. Restricted to bed thanks to difficulties with her pregnancy, Tess passes the time watching people in the park outside, particularly a young woman in a green coat (with a greyhound in a matching one). One day, the greyhound passes by on its own…
Thirteenth in Fairstein's contemporary mystery series about Alexandra Cooper, sex crimes prosecutor in Manhattan. When a burned, decapitated body is found on the steps of a church that used to be a synagogue, there could be any number of reasons. When a second body is found at another church, things start to come together.
Contemporary fantasy ("urban fantasy" gives the wrong idea now, even if it's much more appropriate to this book than to many published under that banner). New constable Peter Grant is about to be sent off to the paperwork unit, but while he's standing guard over a murder scene in the small hours a ghost starts to talk to him. Then things get stranger.
SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant software, is worried about her programmer: he seems to have vanished, and the records she can find aren't helping. So she turns for help to the two humans who are aware of her nature.
Robin Hudson had a promising career as a TV journalist, but blew it with some public embarrassment. Now her ex-husband has a younger and prettier fiancée, her job for not-CNN involves investigating a sperm bank, and she's about to be blackmailed. Then the blackmailer turns up dead…
Fourth mystery book about Bernard Rhodenbarr, professional burglar in 1970s New York.
Classic detective fiction; fourth, roughly, of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant. An unreasonably beautiful young man visiting from America goes to the country to stay with casual acquaintances in a village that's been Discovered by writers and artists, causes social ructions, then disappears. What happened, and was it murder?
Eleventh in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing). A local bric-a-brac shop is burned down, but the body found inside it was shot first. Carole Seddon and Jude investigate again.
Bernard Rhodenbarr, the closest New York in the 1970s can get to a gentleman burglar, is back for his third mystery book appearance. This is the one where the formula changes a bit.
Eighth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia); a homage to the novels of Agatha Christie.
Bernard Rhodenbarr, the closest New York in the 1970s can get to a gentleman burglar, is back for his second book appearance, and the formula sets in: while our hero the burglar is hiding from his victim who's come home unexpectedly, she gets murdered.
First in Block's slightly less-well-known series. Bernard Rhodenbarr is a burglar, and a good one. It's bad enough when the cops walk into the apartment where he's doing his latest job. But then one of them discovers a recently-dead body nearby.
Ninth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series. In Glacier National Park, a trip to move sampling traps for bear DNA is disrupted by an odd bear attack, and the next morning a woman is found dead and mutilated… by human tools.
Second in Brookmyre's new literary direction, moving from the tartan insanity of his earlier books to strictly conventional crime writing.
Diamond Dust is the seventh book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series, and one that makes for a very substantial change in tone.
Tenth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series. Several pubgoers go down with food poisoning, and other events start to make it look like a concerted campaign against the pub. But who's doing it? And why?
Concealed in Death is the forty-eighth story of J. D. Robb's In Death series, and a huge improvement on its immediate predecessor Thankless in Death. It drops many of the science-fictional trappings of the setting to deliver a powerful and well-told story.
Seventh in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series.
Eighth and final book in Ferrars' Andrew Basnett series.
I picked up this collection of novellas for the Robb story, as I was clearly intended to. All the stories here are loosely based on, or more properly inspired by, fairy stories (something of a coincidence given the Elemental Masters series I've also been reading).
The tenth book in Leon's Commissario Brunetti series, as with other series entries I've been reading lately, offers more of the same: descriptions of the seamy underside of Venice interspersed with lightweight police work.
The Vault is the sixth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. I'm definitely liking Lovesey: like any good author of detective fiction, he plays fair with the reader, giving all the necessary clues while hiding them under a chaff-screen of red herrings and misdirection.
Thankless in Death is the forty-sixth of J. D. Robb's In Death series. It's also, for me, the first disappointment.
As one can see from the title, this is the nineteenth full novel in Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. And, well, it feels like a nineteenth novel: it's tired.