12 books like The Cat Who

Though marketed for a YA audience, this book easily crosses over to appeal to all readers, as long as they love a good mystery and some quality character growth.

Main character Stevie Bell loves true crime, and she makes it clear right from the start that she’s not interested in wasting her time with much else. Something of a misfit with a healthy dose of impostor’s syndrome, she’s got something to prove and plenty of stumbling blocks that get in the way. But she is fiercely devoted to finding answers, even to the point of recklessness.

Hints at future romance—never her priority, yet persistently unavoidable—along with her passion, intelligence, and disregard for the rules make her a heroine you can happily follow through several books.  

Barbara is a train wreck in motion. A dumpster fire of a woman.

But she is also a smart, hard-working, talented detective. Which is why in the midst of the Detective Lynley series, she emerged to become the main character of her own book. Here she takes over the spotlight with her usual stubborn refusal to play by the rules, her adherence to comfort over style, and her abrupt—some would say rude—demeanor.

Yet in this book, we see not only her professional acumen but also her tender heart, as she falls in love and races to protect those she cares about most. She is always a work in progress, but in this mystery, we get all the best parts of her.

Isabel Dalhousie is a moral philosopher by profession. She edits a journal on the subject. One of the most intriguing aspects of this series is that she’s always weighing the moral shoulds and shouldn’ts of her circumstances and her cases. What is her obligation to act? To speak? To pursue? Insatiably curious, her habit makes these books ripe with meaning. Set in a charming Edinburgh, between her bassoon-playing friend Jamie, her no-nonsense, Spiritualist housekeeper, Grace, and her slightly wild, deli-owning niece, Cat, Isabel has her hands and her mind full navigating what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s in-between. Her constant self-scrutiny is part of what caused me to be as transparent as I am about the metaphysics in my own books.

Patricia Wentworth is one of the most atmospheric writers I’ve read.

This is the first in her Miss Silver series, featuring an elderly lady who looks a lot like Miss Marple but pre-dates her. While still within the cozy genre, parts of this book, especially the opening section, where the mysterious man in the gray mask makes his first appearance, can make your spine tingle with that delicious feeling of tension that only a good mystery book brings.

Like Miss Marple, Miss Silver is adept at deducing what the various protagonists might do based on her reading of their psychology, but the characters are much better fleshed out in these books, as is the period in which it is set. And the romance is a definite bonus.

It was so difficult to pick just one book by the ‘Queen of Crime’, but for me, The Body in the Library is the perfect murder mystery set in an English village. When Dolly Bantry finds the body of a beautiful young woman in her library one morning, she immediately calls her best friend, Jane Marple. Miss Marple arrives at the hotel where the dead girl worked and finds herself in a world of glamorous dancers and wealthy invalids. She sets out to uncover the murderer and restore her friends’ reputations.

Not only did I, as the reader, get a great mystery to solve, but the main character is a baker who owns her own shop, The Cookie Jar, so there are a ton of delightful recipes included! I enjoyed the family dynamics in Fluke’s books between Hannah, her two sisters, and her mother.

The romantic dynamic between Hannah and the two love interests was intriguing. It’s also set in Minnesota, where I’m originally from, so I could perfectly picture the setting and feel the cold in winter. 

I love this main character.

Ruth Galloway is independent, smart, and self-sufficient, and there’s a lot about her life that sounds ideal to me. She lives in a coastal landscape with her cat? Sign me up!

She’s also flawed and does not conform to traditional beauty standards—the perfect heroine for intelligent, insightful investigation of a clever mystery, and a developing love story. And that love story isn’t sappy and romantic. It’s plagued with troubles: fear of vulnerability, social roadblocks, and scars from past lovers.

Plenty to work through over the next fifteen books! Add in the mysterious Cathbad, scientist and druid, and the atmospheric wealth of the coastal wetlands and their ancient history, and this is a book, and a series, I never got tired of reading.

I was hooked in the first chapter when the protagonist, Mary Russell, meets Sherlock Holmes, who is retired. There – do I have to say more?

She is a young woman and Sherlock is, well, Sherlock, and yet she matches wits with him while they end up in the middle of a creative and a bit scary Sherlock Holmes-ish tale. I couldn’t wait to get and read the sequels.

I admit it: I underestimated Flavia de Luce.

She is 11 years old, self-schooled, and lives outside a small English town in the 1950s. She is overlooked and underestimated by everyone. Deep inside, I’m still 11 years old, underestimated, and overlooked. I had an insatiable desire to learn about my environment, and I often saw things others didn’t. Flavia also reminds me of my childhood living in the country in the 1980s. I ran unchecked, safe, and constantly delighted in discovering new things about my corner of the world. I wince at the de Luce family politics. I cheer Flavia’s investigations and her fearlessness. I want nothing more than to stay in Flavia’s 11-year-old world forever. She is the kick-ass kid I wanted to be. 

I love a woman who’s hard to love.

Tough, even prickly on the outside, but with hidden softness that leads her to unexpected places. She doesn’t know herself well and often stumbles over her own stubbornness…until she embraces vulnerability and accepts herself as she is.

That’s Agatha Raisin right down to the ground. Clearly intelligent, highly motivated, dedicatedly independent, strong to her core, yet when she strikes out on a new life path, she fumbles nearly everything and has to learn the hard way how to start over. 

There is humor in her journey, too, keeping things light even when murder and social discord show up. And, as with Ruth Galloway, tantalizing hints at an unlikely romance kept me coming back for more.