Here are 36 books that The Case of the Famished Parson fans have personally recommended if you like
The Case of the Famished Parson.
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I grew up binge-reading murder mysteries and promised myself that some day, I would write one too. A Long Shadow is the first book in my Chief Inspector Shadow series set in York. Luckily, living in a city so full of history, dark corners, and hidden snickelways, I am never short of inspiration. When I’m not coming up with new ways to bump people off, I enjoy red wine, dark chocolate, and blue cheese—not necessarily together!
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.
હોટેલમાં અડધેથી પોતાનું પર્ફોર્મન્સ છોડીને ભાગેલી યુવાન ડાન્સરની લાશ બેન્ટ્રી કપલના ઘરની લાઇબ્રેરીમાંથી મળી આવે છે. બીજી તરફ ગામથી દૂર એક સૂમસામ ખીણમાં બળીને કોલસો થઇ ગયેલી બીજી એક યુવાન છોકરીની લાશ પણ મળી આવે છે. શું આ બંને ઘટનાઓને જોડતી કોઈ લિન્ક હતી?રિટાયર્ડ આર્મી કર્નલ, એનો તોછડો પડોશી, અતિ શ્રીમંત પણ દુઃખી અને અપંગ બિઝનેસમેન, ભૂતકાળમાંથી છટકીને નવું જીવન શરૂ કરવા માટે તલસી રહેલા થોડાં યુવાન સ્ત્રીપુરુષો -- આ બધાં જ શંકાના દાયરામાં છે. આ દરેક લોકો કંઇક તો છુપાવે જ છે, પરંતુ સૌની પાસે ખુદની નિર્દોષતા સાબિત કરવા માટેના સજ્જડ પુરાવાઓ પણ છે. માત્ર એક જ વ્યક્તિ જાણે…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I grew up binge-reading murder mysteries and promised myself that some day, I would write one too. A Long Shadow is the first book in my Chief Inspector Shadow series set in York. Luckily, living in a city so full of history, dark corners, and hidden snickelways, I am never short of inspiration. When I’m not coming up with new ways to bump people off, I enjoy red wine, dark chocolate, and blue cheese—not necessarily together!
This is another murder mystery set in a quintessential English village and where we meet detective Adam Dalgleish for the first time. The day after the church fete, Sally Jupp is found dead in her bedroom, the door locked from the inside. I loved the way tension gradually builds through the story and how expertly each character is drawn. Nobody is who they seem, including the victim.
The first in the series of scintillating mysteries to feature cunning Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh from P.D. James, the bestselling author hailed by People magazine as “the greatest living mystery writer.”
Sally Jupp was a sly and sensuous young woman who used her body and her brains to make her way up the social ladder. Now she lies across her bed with dark bruises from a strangler’s fingers forever marring her lily-white throat. Someone has decided that the wages of sin should be death...and it is up to Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh to find who that someone is.
I am a Northern Irish crime writer. I worship storytellers, no matter if the stories are relayed on the page, the screen, or in songs. As long as the stories come across as real, then I am happy.
I, as a storyteller, endeavor to be more of a "camera" than a “writer.” I believe it’s all there waiting for me, and as a “camera,” I am allowed to go deep into myself and record all that my imagination is producing. I believe all the books I have selected have helped me in some small way understand why some of us can commit crimes while others can’t.
Colin Dexter immediately pulls me into what reads as a real world.
The writing is so beautiful, I’m not aware of anything but the story. The chapters are delightfully short and tight, so much so that the pages absolutely flow past.
I prefer reading books that, even though they are clearly fiction, read as true crime stories. When I read a Colin Dexter Morse mystery, I am unaware of pages, chapters, sentences, punctuation. I am allowed to be totally immersed in the story. The casts of perfectly drawn characters in each story always intrigue me.
Morse is flawed, a quality he shares with the camera. He doesn’t mind being wrong, a rare quality in a human.
Last Bus to Woodstock is the novel that began Colin Dexter's phenomenally successful Inspector Morse series.
'Do you think I'm wasting your time, Lewis?' Lewis was nobody's fool and was a man of some honesty and integrity. 'Yes, sir.' An engaging smile crept across Morse's mouth. He thought they could get on well together . . .
The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man - facing charges of wilful murder, sexual assault and rape.…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I grew up reading Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and everything British. My first novel celebrated American literature and small towns, and my first murder mystery was a love letter to England. I once spent twenty days visiting almost thirty bookshops and reading my way all over England, and let me tell you, I learned a thing or two about murders.
Everyone has probably seen an episode (or two hundred) of that favorite British detective series, Midsomer Murders. But not everyone knows that the series about what has to be the most depleted part of England is, in fact, based on seven novels by Caroline Grahams.
This is the first book, but they are all definitely worth a read. It’s easy to see how the books turned into a beloved TV series, with its unique blend of cozy English villages and twisted English villagers.
Badger's Drift is an ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster with a nice line in homemade cookies. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up an unseemly fuss, loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething below the picture-postcard prettiness. In the grand tradition of the quietly intelligent copper, Barnaby has both an irresistibly dry sense of humor and a keen insight into what makes people…
The writing of Mad Hatter (my 7th book), was fueled by curiosity about WW2 and about my absent father. I emigrated to Canada as a young woman and pursued a career in the Arts – theatre, painting, writing. But only when I embarked on this fictionalized family story did I begin to uncover shocking family secrets as I pulled together threads of childhood memory, woven in with research material, trying to make sense of it all. Writing has literally saved my life, and Mad Hatter has liberated me in a manner I could never have predicted. I am an intense, passionate workaholic, writing in many genres, exulting in life's surprises!
Jewish internment in Britain is a little-known aspect of WW2. Baddiel based this novel on his grandfather's experience as a German-Jewish refugee to Britain, fleeing Nazi persecution. It is an ironic story of a man interned on the Isle of Man as an “enemy alien,” when war breaks out. Baddiel’s excellent story-telling led me to write a scene in my own family-inspired novel; between a character based on my father, also interned on the Isle of Man, and a Jewish refugee he encounters in the camp. They meet in the potato fields and, after some bristling, form a bond.
THE SECRET PURPOSES, David Baddiel's third novel, takes us into a little-known and still somewhat submerged area of British history: the internment of German Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. Isaac Fabian, on the run with his young family from Nazism in East Prussia, comes to Britain assuming he has found asylum, but instead finds himself drowning in the morass of ignorance, half-truth, prejudice, and suspicion that makes up government attitudes to German Jews in 1940. One woman, June Murray, a translator from the Ministry of Information, stands out - and when she comes…
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
I love weird and inexplicable things, and Gef's story is undoubtedly the weirdest tale of a real-life (ostensibly) paranormal phenomenon I have ever encountered.
The more you know about it, the weirder it gets, and Christopher Josiffe’s meticulously researched account really delivers. Gef’s story isn’t exactly about ghosts, per se—it’s not clear where the Extra Special Talking Mongoose came from or what he was supposed to be—but it fits nicely with my interest in the uncanny.
In true Fortean fashion, Josiffe lays out all the evidence for what happened with minimal attempts at interpretation, leaving the reader to puzzle it all out. And the final chapters, which cover similar “hauntings” and potentially relevant folklore, are worth the price of admission alone.
An exhaustive investigation of the case of Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel,” who appeared to a family living on the Isle of Man.
“I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!”
During the mid-1930s, British and overseas newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel” who had allegedly appeared in the home of the Irvings, a farming family in a remote district of the Isle of Man. The creature was said to speak in several languages, to sing, to steal objects from nearby farms, and to eavesdrop on local…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I first encountered Spare in my early teens, when I was reading books about the occult, and then forgot about him for a few years. As time went by, I grew more interested in surrealism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, but I never quite abandoned magic, and I came to see it’s really the same area. I used to think it was funny that the Dewey library classification system puts Freud and the occult next to each other, but now I see it makes perfect sense. It’s all about exploring the mind and inner experience. And Austin Osman Spare, like Crowley and the surrealists, is among its most interesting figures.
Grant met Spare in 1949 through his wife Steffi, who had read a ‘human interest’ feature about him in a magazine. Based on Grant’s diary, this book records the real Spare in the pubs of South London and the West End before Grant semi-fictionalized him.
Grant had a sense of humour, and after introducing Spare to witchcraft revivalist Gerald Gardner, he watched him try to outdo Gardner in boasting about witchcraft, then went home and wrote that it was “screamingly funny.”
This is a substantial tome, beautifully produced and illustrated, with plenty of time-travelling period detail. Steffi remembers when pubs had live pianists, often playing ‘The Harry Lime Theme’ from The Third Man: “It seemed the signature tune of Spare at that period, and hearing it now fills me with nostalgia.”
My love of British crime fiction began when, as a young teen, I discovered Agatha Christie on the shelves of my local library. With Scottish grandparents, I was already well indoctrinated in the “everything British is best” theory, but it was as a student at St. Clare’s College, Oxford, that I fell totally under the spell of the British Isles. No surprise, then, that my Kate Hamilton Mystery series is set in the UK and features an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. I love to read the classic mysteries of the Golden Age as well as authors today who follow that tradition.
When I think of the classic mysteries of the Golden Age, I automatically picture an English country house. In Deborah Crombie’s A Bitter Feast, Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James, are invited for a fall getaway at Beck House a country estate in the Cotswolds. When a posh charity luncheon catered by brilliant young chef Viv Holland turns deadly, Duncan and Gemma are pulled into the investigation. While I enjoyed the masterful unfolding of the investigation and the fascinating behind-the-scenes look into a high-end restaurant kitchen, it was the iconic setting that hooked me. Worthy of Miss Marple herself.
"Crombie’s characters are rich, emotionally textured, fully human. They are the remarkable creations of a remarkable writer."—Louise Penny
“Nobody writes the modern English mystery the way Deborah Crombie does—and A Bitter Feast is the latest in a series that is gripping, enthralling, and just plain the best.” — Charles Todd, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Ascot and A Cruel Deception
New York Times bestselling author Deborah Crombie returns with a mesmerizing entry in her “excellent” (Miami Herald) series, in which Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James are pulled into a dangerous web of secrets, lies,…
I’ve been fascinated by true murder cases ever since I started reading about them when I was sixteen years old. They draw on all your senses and emotions: your curiosity about the psychology behind the killer’s actions and your horror and sympathy for the victims, their families, and the families of the killers because they suffer too. As a writer I am particularly drawn to apparent miscarriages of justice and I think there must be a secret detective hidden deep in my soul because I love to delve and investigate these. I wrote my first book after retiring from my long career in Social Services and Mental Health Services.
I investigated the murder of Irene Hart after I found an account of the crime in this anthology of murders. I was horrified to see that there had been an apparent miscarriage of justice with the wrong man being hanged. I researched the case and wrote my first book. Margaret’s book is very special to me as it started my career as a true crime writer. Although this is an anthology of crimes committed in the author’s home town they could have happened anywhere. The motives and reasons for murder are the same everywhere: greed, jealousy, sex, envy, or just a purely evil soul. Excellent book by an author who had a weekly true crime column in the local paper.
Rotherham Murders - True Crime BooksSet in a social backdrop of recovery from two world wars, Margaret Drinkall's Rotherham Murders concentrates on killings that took place in and around the town during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Most of her cases have not been written about in recent years, but are now investigated and told by a modern crime historian. Read about the brutal death of a policeman, a sensational 'body in a trunk' murder which resulted in Scotland Yard detectives coming to Rotherham and the very first wireless appeal for helping catching the culprit. Other sad…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I've always been fascinated by stories about married couples, especially when there are secrets in the marriage. My series The Rannoch Fraser Mysteries follows Mélanie and Malcolm Rannoch, whose marriage began when Mélanie, a French agent, married British agent Malcolm to spy on him during the Napoleonic Wars. As the Rannochs investigate mysteries, they grapple with personal and political betrayals and the secrets between them.
This is another favorite series, but this book in particular is a pivotal story.
The secrets of Duncan's ex-wife are fascinating in their own right but also in how they impact the relationship of the central series characters, Duncan and Gemma. The mystery is resolved in this book, but the personal revelations ripple through the series in fascinating ways and raise the stakes going forward.
Five years ago, the talented Cambridge poet Lydia Brooks apparently committed suicide. Now Victoria McClellan, is writing a biography about the renowned Lydia. However as she digs deeply into the background of the deceased poet, Vic begins to question whether Lydia actually killed herself or was murdered. She turns to her estranged former spouse, Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid for help.
