Historical Mysteries, Part I

As you’ll have noticed from my Fall 2025 bookshelf and many other posts, both here and in the monthly Five Directions Press “Books We Loved” section, I read a lot of mysteries. Three that I described in that Fall Bookshelf post—Andrea Penrose’s Murder at Somerset House, Mimi Matthews’s The Marriage Method, and S.J. Bennett’s The Queen Who Came In from the Cold—are also parts of larger projects. So I thought it might be fun to run a set of posts about some of the series I consider worth my readers’ attention—many by well-known authors but also some, equally deserving, by writers who publish with smaller presses. This week, I’m focused on historical mysteries; next week, I’ll share some contemporary ones. And feel free to post suggestions of your own in the comments.

Colleen Cambridge, Phyllida Bright series

Colleen Cambridge actually has two historical mystery series running side-by-side. The other one revolves around the chef Julia Child and her adventures in Paris. This one plays off various Agatha Christie novels, featuring Christie’s housekeeper, Phyllida Bright—a competent and determined woman with long-established ties to her famous boss and an internal image of herself as a female Hercule Poirot.

A humorous ongoing “bit” is her frenemy-style relationship with the chauffeur and his mop-haired dog, who probably don’t go out of their way to make Phyllida’s life miserable, but she certainly believes that they do. (And in the case of the chauffeur, she may be right about that.)

The series opens with Murder at Mallowan Hall. The latest installment, Two Truths and a Murder, will be out before Halloween.

Irina Shapiro, Tate and Bell Mysteries

I’ve mentioned Irina Shapiro’s Redmond and Haze series on this blog before, but I also enjoy her newer series featuring Sebastian Bell, an officer at Scotland Yard with a troubled past, and Gemma Tate, a nurse who served with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and is now trying to find her way in a London medical world that has scant respect for the innovations that Nightingale and her nurses introduced.

Drawn together by the murder of Gemma’s brother, these two strong and complicated characters establish a partnership that gradually turns romantic. In addition to the social commentary and the puzzles that Sebastian and Gemma solve, a bonus is the glimpses into the early career of Daniel Haze, a main protagonist of the previous, still ongoing series.

The series begins with The Highgate Cemetery Murder. The sixth installment, Murder on the Prince Regent, is due at the beginning of November.

Catherine Lloyd, Miss Morton series

Novels set in nineteenth-century Britain featuring aristocratic women—even aristocratic women who solve murders—are far from rare. What gives Catherine Lloyd’s series featuring Miss Caroline Morton its twist is that Caroline exists in a kind of social limbo caused by her father’s scandalous death.

Even the “Miss” is something of a statement, because Caroline should properly be addressed as Lady Caroline Morton (a title restricted to the highest levels of the British aristocracy. Instead, she supports herself as a companion to Mrs. Frogerten, the widow of a (gasp!) rich industrialist set on launching her own daughter into London society.

While doing her best to rein in the Frogerten daughter, Caroline encounters a series of crimes, which she resolves with intelligence combined with a healthy sense of self-preservation. Her first adventure, Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder, came out in 2022; the fourth book, Miss Morton and the Missing Heir, appeared just a couple of weeks ago.

C.M. Rawlins, Maeve Morgan Historical Cozies

This historical cozy mystery series set in 1920s Scotland features Maeve Morgan, a former police officer who through a chain of circumstances has inherited the title of Countess of Baritone and Strathfulton and the crumbling but large and beautiful estate that goes with it.

The series begins with Death in a Classroom, where Maeve has barely had a chance to meet her small, elderly staff before she discovers a body in Strathfulton’s one-room schoolhouse. The cause of the schoolteacher’s death—a large knife embedded under his ribs—is clear enough. But who would want to murder Mr. MacGregor?

Faced with the usual bumbling and disinterested local constable, Maeve dusts off her professional skills to solve the mystery. As a result, people start calling on her for help, and the result is six (to date) fun adventures with a well-developed and interesting sleuth. Book 7, Death in the Cockpit, comes out at the end of November.

Clara McKenna, Stella and Lyndy Mysteries

I discovered this series when it was already well underway and went back to fill in the blanks. It features Stella Kendrick, a dollar princess from Kentucky whose horse-breeding father has arranged her marriage to Viscount Lyndhurst (known as Lyndy) without bothering to inform Stella of his plans until they’re on Lyndy’s doorstep.

Against all odds, Stella and Lyndy share a mutual attraction despite their personality and cultural differences, but the course of their relationship is regularly interrupted by the appearance of dead bodies.

The first, in Murder at Morrington Hall, belongs to the vicar who should have married them. The most recent installment, Murder at Cottonwood Creek—in which Stella and Lyndy, now husband and wife, are visiting Montana with Lyndy’s father, an amateur paleontologist, when trouble strikes—will be out right before Thanksgiving.