Murder on the Matterhorn
By Glyn Carr

Abercrombie Lewker, an experienced if unlikely mountaineer, is about to embark on a climbing holiday in the Swiss Alps when he’s persuaded by his old chief at Department Seven to change his itinerary to Zermatt, where Léon Jacot, a French national hero and sportsman who is about to enter politics, is climbing the Matterhorn. Lewker is charged with finding out whether Jacot will be aligning himself with or against the Communists, an issue of grave concern to England. But shortly after Lewker’s arrival, Jacot plunges to his death in an ill-advised solo ascent of the fabled mountain, and it now falls to Lewker to keep Herr Schultz of the Swiss police from arresting the wrong suspect from among the many who had reason to want Jacot dead. Originally published in 1951, it’s the second detective novel featuring the rotund Shakespearean actor-manager Abercrombie Lewker.

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The Puzzle of the Silver Persian
By Stuart Palmer

Hildegarde Withers, the angular schoolteacher with a talent for solving homicides, thought she was off on a vacation when she set sail for England aboard the S.S. American Diplomat. But she’s no sooner found her sea legs than her fellow passengers start getting murdered, and the killings continue after the ship has docked in London. Hildy offers her services to a singularly unimpressed Chief Inspector Cannon of Scotland Yard, but his well-bred young sergeant, John Secker, is more than willing to listen to her. She accepts an invitation to visit the Cornwall home of a fellow passenger, the Honorable Emily Pendavid, who lives in the oldest inhabited castle in England along with her nephew and a handsome silver Persian cat, and it’s there that the pieces finally fall into place for Hildy. First published in 1934, it’s the fifth case for everybody’s favorite meddlesome schoolmarm.

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The Yellow Violet
By Frances Crane

This third outing in the Pat and Jean Abbott series is set in the early months of World War II at a time when everyone smoked, women wore girdles, and warships could be seen steaming along past Fisherman’s Wharf. Tall, lanky private detective Pat is back home in San Francisco, doing some work for the government and just hours away from marrying his sweetheart Jean Holly, when a fellow detective is murdered in his office, the only clue a yellow violet. First published in 1942, it’s a richly evocative portrait of one of America’s favorite cities as well as of a country newly at war.

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Corpse Diplomatique
By Delano Ames

Somehow a simple holiday in the Basse-Alpes where Jane and Dagobert could study their Provençal turns out to be an extended stay in Nice at the Pension Victoria, where the couple make friends with an assortment of guests and quite naturally become involved in a murder. Dagobert is convinced that the intended victim is Don Diego Sebastiano, the Vice Consul for Santa Rica in Nice, but instead it’s Major Hugh Cartwright, a fellow guest at the pension, who takes the bullet. Blackmail, black market dealings, young love, and the volatile politics of the faraway Central American republic of Santa Rica all complicate Dagobert’s attempts to solve the murder, but in the end all is resolved. A charming look at the postwar French Riviera, Corpse Diplomatique was first published in 1950.

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Death in the Quadrangle
By Eilís Dillon

When Professor Daly is called out of his comfortable retirement at Crane’s Court to deliver a series of lectures at his old college in Dublin, he is surprised to discover how little he has missed academia and how eccentric, not to say vicious, his former colleagues now seem to him. He soon learns he has another job to do: find out who has been sending death threats to Professor Bradley, the new and almost universally disliked president of the college. To this end he enlists the aid of his old friend Inspector Mike Kenney, who like the rest of his fellow Guards is terrified at the prospect of dealing with the egocentric faculty. First published in 1956, this third and final mystery by the author is a witty and perceptive look at professors behaving badly, a subject that as a faculty wife herself she had ample experience of.

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Death and the Maiden
By Gladys Mitchell

Miss Priscilla Carmody and her niece Connie are dismayed when their overbearing second cousin Edris Tidson, a banana grower from the Canary Islands, arrives at their home uninvited with his much younger wife Crete and announces their intention to move in with them. They all go on holiday to Winchester, where Tidson is anxious to follow up reports of a naiad who has been spotted in the River Itchen. Then, shortly after their arrival, two boys are found murdered in the very area Tidson has been prowling. Mrs. Bradley, a friend of Miss Carmody, immediately begins investigating with the aid of her lively niece Laura and her old friend Detective Inspector David Gavin. First published in 1947, it’s generally ranked as one of Gladys Mitchell’s best works, and it richly reflects her love of the English countryside.

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Sent to His Account
By Eilís Dillon

Miles de Cogan is an impoverished Dublin bookkeeper who is overjoyed to find that he has inherited the prosperous County Wicklow estate (and title) of his late cousin, a baronet. A kind and generous man, Miles decides to put some of his progressive ideas into practice and turn the village flour mill into a cooperative, a plan that’s enthusiastically welcomed by all involved, but it gets put on hold when his overbearing neighbor, Tom Reid, is murdered. Reid’s plans to build a roadhouse had incurred the wrath of everyone in Dangan, and when Inspector Pat Henley of the Irish Guards arrives on the scene, he finds more suspects than he can handle. Full of Irish wit and color, it’s this distinguished author’s second mystery, first published in 1954.

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