The Ruth Galloway Mystery series is one of the best, most endearing and fascinating mystery series I have ever read. The series follows Ruth who is a forensic archaeologist Professor at a university in Norfolk UK. She lives by the sea next to marsh lands in a lonely cottage and though that sounds grey and dull it is a homely and anchoring setting. Ruth’s character is brilliant and thoughtful with a trenchant POV and her vulnerabilities are common ones that many women can instantly relate to. Her friends are mostly quirky individualists or academics or police (long story that) and not stock supporting characters, their stories are part of the series too. What makes the series so satisfying is it builds on the preceding novels while introducing new characters in the latest book while exploring prior characters back stories, who grow and change and tie both into the current action which keeps the series fresh and interesting. Her writing style is a blend of realism and whimsy and grounded observations together with haunting moody mysticism. Elly Griffiths is a master of building suspense slowly and steadily and alternating it with simultaneous situations occurring alongside each other which form a shifting cumulative narrative picture. It is a well-loved series for me because the characters create an emotional pull which I find is rare in a mystery.
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This mystery is set in a Victorian London swathed in smoggy fog with omnibuses pulled by horses, railways clattering by, steamboats on the Thames, smoke filled pubs and posh squares lined with newly built townhouses. The London of an evolving Scotland Yard when ‘case files’ were considered a novel policing technique and women riding bicycles was considered risqué, when men routinely wore top hats and women perched small hats on their heads and wore elaborate dresses with bustles. The heroine is also a novelty a single woman journalist working on Fleet Street for a daily paper. She is struggling to survive after a career setback and is offered a lifeline by a young Scotland Yard inspector who needs her insider knowledge to assist him in solving the scandalous murder of a famous actress, Lizzie Dixie, whom she was friends with. Penny Green agrees to help only if she is re-instated at her old job and she tries to balance her own sorrow with her desire to find justice for her old friend and Annie, her daughter. Penny’s connections in the theater world gain access for her and the inspector to meet with the Drury Lane theater proprietor Sebastian an early supporter of Lizzie and Lizzie’s husband an overbearing successful showman in the style of a P.T. Barnum.
The seaside town of Whitby, overlooked by the ruisn of a famous medieval Abbey high on a cliff, is the setting for this new series featuring Liz, a widowed early retiree who moves to Whitby, buys the adjacent Kipper and Gull Cottages to live in and renovate. For company she rescues Nelson an English Bull terrier, and while walking one morning in the church graveyard near the ancient Abbey they find the dead body of the well-known Professor Crowby recently working on curating the Abbey museum collection.
This is a mystery and a second chances story set in early 1960s rural England and tells the story of an ordinary middle aged single woman who buys a dilapidated cottage, Sixpenny Holding, hoping to finally begin living life on her terms. She dreams of writing romantic novels of suspense and this ambition is complicated when her widowed brother’s daughter’s caregiver, her aunt, dies suddenly and Marian finds herself raising an opinionated 5-year-old. Both are initially wary of each other but slowly things improve and a cousin, a withdrawn 11-year-old, temporarily joins the tiny household together with a kitten. It sounds too sweet but it’s not, mostly because Marian is a combination of down to earth and whimsical that is in tune with the ramshackle ancient cottage.
This is a traditional mystery series with a modern heroine, Kate Shackleton, who runs a detective agency with her assistant Sykes a retired policeman, and her housekeeper who acts as a sometimes aide/secretary. What sets this series apart to me is that it captures the essence of a time as the modern era clashes and challenges the traditional in post WWI England and typically features some aspect of the new era, in this mystery it’s a pageant for North Riding Brewery queen and the use of branding as a marketing tool.
I love this series, it’s a traditional cozy set in England narrated by a transplanted American, Dorothy Martin, a 60-ish widow happily re-married to a retired English Chief Constable, Alan Nesbitt, who lives in a quintessential English cottage in a cathedral town in southeast England. Dorothy is unabashedly an Anglophile and mixes enthusiasm with sharp humor and sometimes tact. She forges ahead in life but this energy is tempered by common sense and her impulsive, intuitive style and outspokenness are softened by shrewdness and the ability to connect random dots into a cohesive pattern. She is also very funny in her observations and descriptions are effortlessly entertaining. This lady has style and it’s not just her hats!
The latest entry in this long running and excellent series featuring China Bayles, a former high powered attorney who now owns an herbal shop and cafe in Pecan Springs, Texas is all about orchids, especially the orchid that produces vanilla beans. This series always features a key herb, spice or flower which becomes intertwined with the plot in the same way a vine winds around a post, naturally and effortlessly. The mysteries also educate on the history and uses of the title herb, spices, flower or other botanical, and this one features vanilla. It’s fascinating to me since I like gardening and herbs and cooking with natural ingredients so I enjoy these mysteries for their focus on plants and their varied uses, it makes one realize how many wonderful products we use to flavor our foods or use for healing that come from plants.
Another amazing mystery in this series, dazzling in its intensity and suspense, politically charged, the underdog and the corrupt are again the focus with the amazing V. I. Warshawski getting drawn into two seemingly unrelated mysteries, one to protect her friend’s nephew and the other to find the missing niece of her ex-husband. This is a very timely mystery involving the Russian mob, a corrupt Billionaire, teams of wily lawyers, abused young women, Muslim émigrés and ancient mid-Eastern stolen art objects. Wow!
Sixty something Poppy Harmon is newly widowed and flat broke and is living in Palm Springs, CA and forced to find a new career she decides to become a Private Investigator because – as a former TV star in a popular PI series from the 1970s – that qualifies her or at least in California it does. Her best friends, Iris and Violet, polar opposites, and Violet’s 12 year old grandson a tech whiz, all sign up to assist and a new enterprise is born in Iris’s garage. One small problem, no customers. So Poppy convinces her daughter’s boyfriend Matt, a struggling talented actor, to be the face of the business. The ploy actually works! And they soon have a rich and well known client, a former movie star, whose house was robbed and her valuable and uninsured jewelry stolen.