The Book List 2027

The Book List 2027

Cozy Mystery Through the Decades 📚🔎

(1894)

January (1894)

The Experiences of Loveday Brooke
By Catherine Louisa Pirkis

The Circular Staircase
By Mary Roberts Rinehart

  • A spinster, a rented country mansion, and a body on the circular staircase. In this Edwardian-era 1900s bestseller, Rachel Innes expects a quiet summer and gets strange happenings after dark, a bank failure and a killer in the house. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery launched the “had I but known” style of suspense and later inspired the stage hit The Bat.

  • Gaslit London, 1890s: Loveday Brooke is plain, unassuming and sharper than everyone in the room, which is exactly why a Fleet Street detective agency sends her after its trickiest cases. The Times hailed her as a female Sherlock Holmes, and she is one of the earliest professional women sleuths in fiction, created by a woman writer. Bring your magnifying glass.

The Innocence of Father Brown
By G.K. Chesterton

  • Meet the most unassuming detective in the genre: a small, rumpled priest with a big umbrella and an uncanny understanding of human nature. This 1910s collection of twelve short stories was the very first Father Brown book, and it introduces his friendship with the dashing thief Flambeau. Read it story by story and savor every twist.

April (1928)

May (1931)

June (1933)

Grey Mask
By Patricia Wentworth

The Penguin Pool Murder
By Stuart Palmer

  • A school field trip to the New York Aquarium ends with a body in the penguin pool, and schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers cannot resist finding out who did it. Palmer’s 1930s debut crackles with wit and Depression-era Manhattan atmosphere, and Miss Withers remains one of the genre’s most underrated amateur sleuths.

  • Charles Moray comes home to London expecting a quiet life, and instead finds a secret criminal gang holding a meeting in his own house, run by a masked mastermind. To learn whether the woman he loves is innocent or complicit, he calls in Miss Maud Silver: retired governess, tireless knitter, razor-sharp mind. This 1920s debut introduced the Miss Silver series two years before Miss Marple first appeared in a novel.

March (1911)

February (1908)

The Mad Hatter Mystery
By John Dickson Carr

  • Someone is stealing top hats all over London and leaving them in bizarre places, until the prank turns deadly near the Tower of London. Dr. Gideon Fell, Carr’s large, boisterous, magnificently eccentric detective, takes the case. This 1930s puzzle shows why John Dickson Carr was called the king of the impossible crime.

July (1934)

August (1942)

September (1966)

The Nine Tailors
By Dorothy L. Sayers

The Moving Finger
By Agatha Christie

  • The quiet village of Lymstock is being torn apart by anonymous poison-pen letters, scandalous and vicious and apparently designed to destroy lives. When one recipient is found dead, the local police are baffled. Christie wrote this wartime gem in 1942 and counted it among her own favourites; Miss Marple arrives late and solves it in a flash.

  • Stranded in the Lincolnshire fens on New Year’s Eve, Lord Peter Wimsey fills in for a sick bell-ringer and rings in the new year for nine hours straight. Months later a mutilated body surfaces in a freshly opened grave, and the bells turn out to be central to everything. Sayers’ 1930s masterpiece is atmospheric, intricate and unlike any other mystery.

November (1999)

October (1982)

The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
By Lilian Jackson Braun

  • Jim Qwilleran is a down-on-his-luck newspaper reporter reassigned to the art beat, but his Siamese cat Koko has other ideas about who the real detective is. Lilian Jackson Braun launched this beloved series in 1966 and helped define the cat-sleuth cozy that millions of readers would adore for decades.

December (2026)

We Chase Shadows
By Richard Osman

  • Six months in, the We Solve Murders detective agency has solved exactly zero murders. Then a body turns up on the steps of an Italian villa, and the trail runs from Tuscany to Palm Springs to Barcelona, through a criminal underworld built on counterfeits. Richard Osman’s newest caper is funny, warm and quietly moving, the perfect finale for a year of cozy crime.

The Cooking School Murders
By Virginia Rich

Murder with Peacocks
By Donna Andrews

  • Meg Langslow is a bridesmaid in three weddings at once, while trying to keep peacocks from eating the flower arrangements, her father from running rogue medical experiments on the guests, and a murderer from striking again. Donna Andrews’ 1990s debut won a full shelf of first-novel awards and launched one of cozy mystery’s funniest series.

  • Three people die on the same evening in Harrington, Iowa, after the first meeting of an advanced cooking class. Eugenia Potter, a widow, rancher, instinctive cook and quietly formidable sleuth, starts asking the questions the police haven’t thought of yet. Virginia Rich’s 1980s debut pioneered the culinary mystery and remains a warm, satisfying original.