Posts tagged with mystery in Blog Lost in the Stacks

This is a charming, heartwarming mystery novel about Vera Wong, a widowed Chinese woman in her sixties who finds a dead body in her tea shop in San Francisco's Chinatown and decides she will do a better job than the police at solving the crime. She rounds up four suspects, and then makes friends with them, cooking them delicious Chinese meals. Which one of her four new friends is a murderer?

This is a wonderful historical mystery and thrilling courtroom drama, inspired by actual events, about Martha Ballard, a midwife in 18th century Maine. When a dead body is found in a frozen river, Martha identifies the dead man as a prominent resident of the town, who was accused of rape. She defies the court system to find justice for the rape victim.

The Appeal is a brilliant mystery novel, told in emails and text messages, about a community theater group in a small town in the UK. They launch a fundraising appeal for cancer treatment for their leader's granddaughter, and tensions arise, leading to murder. Two law students sift through the correspondence to discover the truth of what happened.

Dance Hall of the Dead is the second book in Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery series featuring Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn. (It can easily be read without having read the first.) Leaphorn investigates the disappearance of two boys, one Zuñi and one Navajo. The strength of Hillerman's writing is in his descriptions of the locations in New Mexico and Arizona, and of the religion, mythology, and ceremonies of the Navajo and Zuñi. A beautifully-written book!

This is the first in a mystery series set in Bangalore, India, in the 1920s, featuring Kaveri Murthy, an independent-minded young woman with a passion for mathematics and crime-solving. Recently married to a doctor, Kaveri attends a party with her husband's colleagues. The party soon becomes a crime scene, and Kaveri and her husband must find the killer before the wrong person is executed for the murder.

In this highly entertaining Victorian mystery novel, the heroine, the American-born Frances Wynn, Countess of Harleigh, is engaged to her beloved George, her partner in crime solving, when a mysterious woman shows up, claiming to be married to George. He denies it, but then the woman ends up murdered in Frances' garden. Can Frances and George clear their names and go on with their wedding?

This is a delightful mystery novel set in Victorian England, featuring Frances Wynn, an American heiress who married a British aristocrat, and whose husband was murdered in the first book in the series. In this one, she goes to a country house owned by the family of her partner in crime-solving, to attend her sister's wedding. A series of accidents happens to the guests, but Frances realizes they're not accidental at all. Who will be the next victim?

In this creepy novel of suspense set in 1920s Paris, American private investigator Harris Stuyvesant searches for a young woman, an artists' model, who has gone missing. His search takes him to a theater producing realistic horror plays and the studio of an artist who creates art objects out of human bones. He also encounters many famous people from the literary and artistic world of Paris at the time, including Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, and the surrealist artist Man Ray, who plays an important role in the plot. Not for the squeamish, but a perfect Halloween read!

Magpie Murders is a clever mystery within a mystery. It begins with Susan Ryeland, an editor for a London publishing house, reading the last manuscript by a recently deceased mystery author. Then you read the manuscript along with her: a classic English village mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. Frustratingly, it cuts off just before the solution is revealed, and the rest of the book returns to the present day as Susan searches for the missing chapters. Soon enough you learn that the author of the manuscript was murdered, and Susan has to find the real-life murderer as well as the pages that will reveal the murderer in the fictional world.

In this mystery, one of a series set in Gilded Age New York, Prudence MacKenzie, a judge's daughter turned detective, and Geoffrey Hunter, a former Pinkerton agent, search for two missing children--a brother and sister--in the streets of New York. They learn that the missing girl has been sold into prostitution, and, with the help of historical figures such as Jacob Riis and Nellie Bly, attempt to rescue the children. The book paints a detailed portrait of life in New York in the 1890s, from the parlors of the wealthy to the sordid streets and alleyways of the tenements.