A Summer Reading List of Lighthearted Mysteries
For many readers, summer is the time for breezy, undemanding books—the kind you can toss in a beach bag and finish before the sunburn sets in. Sue Halpern, a former New Yorker staff writer whose latest novel, “What We Leave Behind,” came out this week, has a list of recommendations that fit the bill: cozy mysteries. The subgenre is sometimes dismissed by diehard crime fans as too tame or genteel to be included with other true thrillers. But, Halpern contends, “the world is a dark and malevolent place these days, and there is something reassuring about entering a universe full of humor and endearing characters, where good always wins without much spilled blood.”
The Thursday Murder Club
by Richard Osman
By now, Osman’s “Thursday Murder Club” books—the fifth of which is due in September—are the flagship of cozy mysteries. The series is built upon a delightful conceit: in an upscale English retirement village, four residents meet once a week to solve cold cases.
In this, the first installment, there are two deaths—first, of a local contractor with ties to the underworld, then of the retirement village’s rapacious developer. After that, the retirees—formerly a psychiatrist, a nurse, a labor organizer, and, we suspect, an M.I.6 agent—get cracking. What makes the series so delightful is Osman’s wicked sense of humor, and the empathy suffused throughout. Osman’s investigators are people in their later years who are well acquainted with death and what precedes it. And for them, solving murders, consorting with mobsters, and adopting aliases all turn out to be more life-affirming—not to mention entertaining—than chair yoga and a salt-free diet.
Death and Croissants
by Ian Moore
At the outset of this book, Richard Ainsworth, a middle-aged English film historian separated from his wife, has decamped, not entirely happily, to the Loire Valley to run a B. and B. There, he raises hens named Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford, is bullied by his dour housekeeper, glumly serves his guests breakfast, and rewatches old movies. But his life takes a turn for the absurd with the arrival of a beautiful Frenchwoman, Valérie, with an imperious chihuahua, just as another guest goes missing.
Pulled along by Valérie like a recalcitrant puppy, Richard sets off on a quest to find the missing man, who may have ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Along the way, the two encounter a cast of characters that includes a butcher in a Stetson, a man dressed as a chicken, and Richard’s nudist neighbors. It all goes comically wrong until, at long last, it goes comically right, with Valerie and the hapless Richard turning out to be their own version of Hepburn and Tracy. Fortunately for Richard, Valérie decides to spend more time in the Loire Valley, and, fortunately for us, the duo returns in four more novels. The audiobooks, read by the author, who voices the cast with panache and has a dexterous, even (when appropriate) sexy, French accent, are the way to go.
The Charles Lenox Mysteries
by Charles Finch
It seems impossible that Finch hadn’t yet set foot in England when he created the delightful Victorian detective Charles Lenox, an Oxford-educated aristocrat who begins the series as an amateur sleuth and, over time, makes it his profession. Lenox lives in Mayfair, next door to his dearest friend, a widow in her early thirties. He is attended and aided by his faithful manservant, Graham, and sometimes assisted by another confidant, Dr. Thomas McConnell. Yes, there are echoes of Holmes and Watson here, but Lenox is his own man: a humanist, even a kind of feminist, with a deep curiosity and compassion for others that belies his class.
So far, there are more than a dozen books in this series, which stretches from 1850 to 1878. Over time, Lenox evolves—but so do those around him. Graham, it turns out, is a harbinger of an England where class becomes less of a crucial determinant of one’s trajectory, and his path is just as satisfying as Lenox’s.
The Word Is Murder
by Anthony Horowitz
In the “Hawthorne and Horowitz” series, Horowitz—the author of too many books to count and the creator of several TV shows—casts himself as a fictional character. His alter ego collaborates with a gruff, laconic ex-police investigator named Daniel Hawthorne, whom he meets when Hawthorne is hired to consult on Horowitz’s television projects. Soon, Hawthorne asks Horowitz to tag along with him as he solves cases, for the purpose of Horowitz writing a book called “Hawthorne Investigates”—a terrible idea, Horowitz thinks, before going ahead and doing it anyway.
“The Word Is Murder” is the first in the series, and it begins when a widow walks into a funeral parlor one day to arrange her future funeral service and is strangled that very evening. Horowitz is a master of self-deprecating humor, and at depicting the curiosities of his central odd couple. While the detective is busy cracking the case, Horowitz is forever trying to crack the enigma of Hawthorne. One of them succeeds brilliantly. The other, not so much.
