Light Mysteries: What to Read After Watching Glass Onion
It’s the beginning of a new year. It’s the perfect time to reset, relax, and read a light mystery or two. The perfect antidote for all that stress of the new year is a light, cozy mystery. These books feature quirky characters, cute little towns, locally owned businesses, and, oh yeah, lots of murders to solve. The most rewarding thing about picking up these light mysteries is knowing that the detective (or amateur detective) will always find a way to crack the case. But how exactly will they do it? You’ll have to read to find out.
Death of a Traitor is the latest book in M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth Mystery series. Hamish Macbeth is the most quick-witted and least ambitious policeman in all of Scotland. In this novel, he’s called to investigate the disappearance of local woman Kate Hibbert. While Kate has only been a resident of the sleepy village of Lochdubh for a year, she’s already made quite a few enemies. In fact, when her neighbors see Kate lugging her suitcase to the bus stop, they can’t help but hope she’ll be leaving for good. Then two weeks later, Kate’s cousin arrives in town claiming Kate has gone missing. And as Hamish Macbeth investigates the case, he starts to suspect Kate might not be quite who she appeared.
Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary Beast of the Crimea, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and the wealthy young society woman has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey—despite fierce objections from the male doctors around her. When Nightingale’s young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field (a real-life police detective who was also the model for Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House), is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own life. Case closed. Or is it?
Twelve years later, back in London, amidst the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their mouths again covered by the telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way, he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies turn up, and before his own daughter loses her life.
Emily Martin has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. She’s a contributing editor at Book Riot and blogs/podcasts at Book Squad Goals.