25 Years of the Murder Squad: The Best Ten Mystery Books

The Murder Squad has produced four anthologies of short stories, this is the most recent. It features 21 top-notch new tales by Squad members past and present.

Standouts include everyone’s favorite rumpled Northumbrian detective Vera Stanhope investigating a drowning and Kate Ellis’s tale of a hen night in an isolated cottage at which the karaoke singalong of “I Will Survive” proves sadly inaccurate for several members of the group.

The Squad’s founder is an expert at crafting taut psychological thrillers set in an everyday world. This mystery from 2021 features committed school teacher Geri Simpson.

She’s trying to save a relationship that’s collapsing like a cake in the rain, while addressing all the scratchy problems afflicting her adolescent pupils.

When her class golden boy is found dead of an apparent drug overdose in a burned-out house, Geri’s attempts to find out how and why he died lead her into ever darker places

Edwards is best known as the compiler of the brilliant British Library Crime Classics series of UK Golden Age mystery novels and short stories.

Unsurprisingly, given his area of expertise, the author’s own work is also set in the cozy world of the comfortably off and the recently deceased in the decades preceding World War Two.

In this, the fifth of his scintillating series featuring Rachel Savernake, the well-heeled (in every sense) amateur sleuth heads off looking for a crime to solve in Hemlock Bay an English coastal resort favored by the rich, beautiful, and idle.

Naturally, she finds a murder and a maze-like plot. Richard Osman is a fan and it’s easy to see why.

Stomping around the crime scenes of North East England wearing an assortment of clothes that may have been grabbed from the rails of a thrift store, Ann Cleeves’ beloved middle-aged Detective Chief Inspector is a modern-day version of the eccentric amateur sleuth of the Golden Age.

She made her debut in this mystery (built around an unexplained death in an isolated cottage) published the year before the Murder Squad first assembled.

Liverpudlian author Ellis has written 28 mysteries featuring Afro-Caribbean Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson, a workaholic who spends more time in his car than he does with his family.

In this the 24th in the series, a storm blows down an old tree on a farm near the Devon village of Petherham uncovering the skeleton of a hitchhiker who disappeared twelve years before.

Ellis’s piano-wire taut plot pleasingly mixes police procedural with folk horror. 

The first in Staincliffe’s series featuring single-parent PI Sal Kilkenny sees the Manchester-based detective called in by a distraught mother whose son has gone missing.

Sal’s investigation takes her from the grim, gang-crime-dominated streets of the inner city to the leafy suburban avenues where the organized crime kingpins live designer-label lives.

As well as a satisfying mystery it’s a novel that brings Manchester to life in all its raucous, seamy glory.

As well as being home to Sal Kilkenny, the self-styled Capital of the North is also the base of Simms’ teak-tough copper DI Jon Spicer.

In this the fifth in the series, however, Spicer is dragged away from the tower blocks and urban decay of his home patch and into the wild countryside of Derbyshire’s Peak District.

The reason? His brother’s body has been found there.

Uncompromising as granite, Spicer determines to find out who killed him and exact revenge.

The life of a copper in small town Yorkshire is uneventful—underwear thieves, shoplifters, and the occasional runaway dog. DI Charlie Priest and his team spend happy days supping tea, eating chocolate, and engaging in humorous banter.

Then two people die after eating poisoned corned beef bought from a local supermarket and things turn deadly serious.

The ninth in Pawson’s lovely series featuring the likable Priest, is a pleasing cocktail of cozy mystery and dry northern jokes.

Best known these days as a writer of speculative and fantasy fiction, Brenchley began his career as an author of hard-boiled northern noir.

This novel from the nineties features disgraced former policeman, Paul Fenner. He’s dragged back from a life of booze and post-divorce self-pity when a close friend becomes the fifth victim of the serial killer stalking the streets of Newcastle.

As gritty as a gravel road, The Samaritan fuses Thomas Harris with Get Carter.

Not content with creating Vera Stanhope, Tyneside-based author Cleeves came up with a second hugely popular detective in the troubled shape of policeman Jimmy Perez.

The inspector’s home patch is the bleakly beautiful Scottish archipelago of the Shetland Isles.

He makes his memorable debut in this tale of a strangled teenage girl in a community in which isolation has bred suspicion and fear.