5 books like A Cookies & Kilts Mystery

This book was published in 1946, at the end of the 2nd World War, by a writer who had been a model, a dancer, a shop assistant, and a governess, as well as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in a rural hospital, which is where this wartime story is set.

For me, it’s the ultimate "closed circle" whodunnit, where an ever-decreasing group of suspects is trapped together, in this case surrounded by wounded and dying soldiers. It’s brilliantly claustrophobic, and you know it has to be one of the main characters, however unlikely that seems. The solution and the perpetrator are in plain sight. But I didn’t get it till the end.

This book concerns vacationers at a small hotel in the Scottish Hebrides. A murder is committed. Due to the island and the hotel’s remoteness, the location creates a closed community. Everyone has reasons to be annoyed with others, adding tension and motives for murder. I particularly like the enveloping mood of the wild mountains and fog. Radio broadcasts of real-life events (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation preparations and Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb of Mount Everest) add a strange link to the outside world for this group of isolated hotel guests. I felt it also underscored the contrast between their forced solitude and stay at the hotel as opposed to Elizabeth and Hillary’s freedom to do what they wished.

House of Storm features a group of sequestered people who live on a Caribbean island. A murder occurs, pointing to one of the residents as the killer. To increase the story’s feeling of danger and urgency, a storm is headed for them. The house must be secured, shutters put up. Will clues be destroyed in the rain? Is the killer lurking outside or has he sneaked inside, as the unlocked door suggests? I liked the tension created by the heroine’s approaching marriage to a man she doesn’t love, the murder investigation centering around the man she does love, and the storm. I also liked the contrast with Society’s current label of “Paradise”—a leisurely life on a sunny, tropical island.

It is World War Two in England. In Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman a small group of people has been invited to a country house. One of them is killed. The remoteness of the house contributes to the limited group of people as possible killers, making it a classic closed-group story. It’s a good mystery. It also offers a thought-provoking contrast to the real-world event raging at the time, for in the book an English woman is saved by the German doctor. Marsh is not pro-Axis. She’s merely showing our universal dependency on each other to get through a terrifying situation. I loved this idea and thought it quite brilliant of Marsh. And something I think is rather unique in mystery novels.

I’ve always been fascinated by the “dreaming spires” of Oxford University and enjoy Gaudy Night because it immerses me in the world of a (fictional) women’s college set in 1930s Oxford.

As a former professor, I’m intrigued by the internecine political and personal battles in the Senior Common Room (SCR), or college faculty lounge, as well as the friction between those professors devoted entirely to an academic career versus those trying to maintain the challenging balance of work and family, the same issues women struggle with today, nearly one hundred years later.

Sayers weaves together these tensions with a mysterious “poltergeist” who torments the college with poison-pen letters, pranks, vandalism, and violence into a compelling mystery under the dreaming spires.