If you’re like me, there’s nothing you like better than grabbing a great mystery book, a warm drink and a blanket and curling up to read (if there’s a fireplace nearby, all the better). And, if the book is great, they can be a little bit like candy, it’s hard not to want to keep popping another. So, now that we’re well into Fall, and Winter is on the way, here are the first books in five great mystery series that you’ll love cozying up with.
The Buckshaw Chronicles, Volume 1 by Alan Bradley 
The Buckshaw Chronicles, Volume 1, brings together under one spine the bestselling The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, and A Red Herring Without Mustard. Follow our precocious amateur detective with a passion for poison as she investigates the death of a man in her very own backyard’s cucumber patch, goes behind the scenes of a puppet show to find out who wanted the puppet master dead, and as she looks into the crystal ball to find out why corpse after corpse is being found in Bishop’s Lacey. Flavia is a completely enchanting character, and Alan Bradley a masterful writer. Join the adventures!
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.
Twelve Drummers Drumming by C.C. Benison
The Reverend Tom “Father” Christmas, the newest vicar of Thornford Regis, an idyllic rural town in England, turns detective when one of his parishioners turns up dead in a drum, and everyone in town seems to have something to confess. Tom Christmas came to picturesque Thornford Regis with his young daughter to escape the terrible experience of losing his wife in the city. Her murder sent him packing to the bucolic and charming town, where violent crime isn’t supposed to happen and the greatest sin is supposed to be nothing a member of the clergy can’t handle. Then, at the town fair, a woman is found murdered. Tom soon learns that everyone in Thornford Regis has a secret to hide–infidelity, theft, even past murders.
Wish You Were Here by Rita Mae Brown
Small towns are like families: Everyone lives very close together. . .and everyone keeps secrets. Crozet, Virginia, is a typical small town-until its secrets explode into murder. Crozet’s thirty-something post-mistress, Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen, has a tiger cat (Mrs. Murphy) and a Welsh Corgi (Tucker), a pending divorce, and a bad habit of reading postcards not addressed to her. When Crozet’s citizens start turning up murdered, Harry remembers that each received a card with a tombstone on the front and the message “Wish you were here” on the back. Intent on protecting their human friend, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker begin to scent out clues. If only Mrs. Murphy could alert her somehow, Harry could uncover the culprit before the murder occurs—and before Harry finds herself on the killer’s mailing list.
Still Life by Louise Penny
The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines – a place so free from crime it doesn’t even have its own police force. But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets…
What’s your favourite mystery series?
