7 Books Like Millie Dickens, Private Investigator

The book starts with the discovery of an abandoned baby on the steps of a church on a frigid winter's night. The priest who finds the baby is a newcomer to town and quickly finds herself embroiled in the quest to find the baby's mother and father.

The characters in this novel are exceptionally well-developed. Not only do the main characters feel as real as though they stepped right from the pages, but the minor characters do, too.

The setting is raw and fierce—upstate New York in the wintertime. The reader can feel the wind, the snow, and the biting cold.

The plot is masterful. There are twists and turns galore, and the writer doesn't give the main characters much slack. They face constant pushback, unrelenting scrutiny, and physical danger as they try to unravel the threads of the mystery.

I love stories based on real events/real people.

I loved that this book is about the little acts of resistance performed by ordinary people. It is not about the Maquis blowing things up and hiding in the woods. Instead, it highlights how small acts of courage, such as delivering a library book to a Jew, could endanger one’s life.

I found the book easy to read, and I could relate to the perils of the characters trying to live a normal life and maintain dignity in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Maudie Dobbs is everything I’d ever want to be in life given the choice.

I have been “running” Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. I don’t read mysteries usually, but hers are addicting.

This book would make a fine Christmas-time read. It tickles our thinking about “the divine” and about being human. 

This Penny murder mystery takes Gamache and Beauvoir into the Quebec wilderness to a monastery known for its chanting. The monks here try to “touch the divine” in everything they do while distancing themselves from the recent killing.

I love the author’s thematic artistry with light and darkness, as well as her sensory threading in a monastic setting that attempts to minimize it. As with the characters, our senses are activated all along the footpath of the mystery reveal. 

Human trafficking is the subject of this mystery/romance set on California’s spectacular Cypress Coast. 

Angelica McDowell is a struggling glass-blowing artist with a day job at the Monterey Aquarium. When she is offered a commission to design a major installation for a new resident of nearby Pebble Beach, the opportunity sounds too good to be true.

The action in this novel takes place up and down the coast from Monterey to Big Sur. While the story stands on its own merits, my enjoyment was greatly enhanced by Alison Henderson’s use of the Cypress Coast as the backdrop for this novel. By the time I had finished reading, I felt as though I had seen Carmel, Big Sur, and Monterey through the author’s eyes.

Keyes was a journalist (she died in 1970), and her background informed every novel she wrote. 

Joy Street is set primarily in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. At the time I read this book, I had never been to Boston. When I finally visited that city several years later, her descriptions of the area in and around Beacon Hill still were so vivid in my mind that I felt as though I already knew the neighbourhood intimately.

Keyes had an equally deft hand with character development and plot. Joy Street is a book populated with characters that seem real and a story that moves forward at a satisfying pace.

It is a joy to read.