The best books with a historic crime driving the current story

Written and set in the 1950s, this is the 4th in the Felse detective series.

Peters is more famous for the Cadfael mysteries, with their wonderful depiction of England at the time of the civil war between Stephen and Maud. However, the Cadfael books need to be read in order and the first is far more successful in the BBC adaptation.

Dated in some ways, and with prose that’s functional rather than beautiful, Peters has a brilliant eye for capturing a period. The clever trail of clues means it’s possible to work out the mystery so the reveal is satisfying and doesn’t cheat the reader.

If you like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (the 1974 film is dated but still brilliant), you’ll probably enjoy this too.

Tey spins a great yarn about how the past keeps its claws in us, whether it’s unravelling a historic mystery (in this case the Princes in the Tower) or uncovering the truth about a past crime because of a present one (as in my favourite Tey, Brat Farrar, which unfortunately has a cousin-romance storyline that isn’t terrible palatable, though easy to ignore).

Daughter of Time takes an incisive look at how the evidence we pick, put together, and ignore changes the story we tell about real events; interpretation is an art, not a science, and socio-political pressures – and powerful individual characters – have shaped history as we know it. Nicola Upson’s An Expert in Murder, which features Tey as a character, is on my TBR pile.

It’s a rare book indeed where there’s a twist with such profound implications that it throws the story off in a completely new direction and draws back the curtain to show everything that’s come before isn’t what it seemed.

It’s hard enough to pull that off in an ending, but to pull it off at the mid-point is as rare as it is wonderful to read. Rebecca (and Brat Farrar) are two of the only examples I know where it’s done successfully. Most authors who try to accomplish this focus on deceiving the reader – the best writers focus on misleading them so the reveal feels true and inevitable, rather than merely surprising (and often a bit cheat-y).

The Hitchcock film is dated but brilliant, despite Fontaine’s lackluster performance.

The ‘crime’ in Animal Dreams is a legal technicality, and this is a literary contemporary novel rather than a crime one, but its narrative drive comes from the same need to untangle the past to set the characters free (or as free as they can be) in the present.

The writing is glorious – rich, deep, surprising, layered – reaching levels of technical mastery that few other writers even glimpse. There are several point-of-view characters and, unlike most books with this structure, Kingsolver wrings every last drop of drama and interest from the nuances this offers.

Instead of longing to get back to a preferred perspective, the reader revels in how vivid, how real, each character feels in turn. If you love LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, you’ll probably adore this.

Vivid, surprising, and psychologically astute, The Wicked Girls stands out among a plethora of books with a similar premise.

There are no easy answers or pat solutions here. This is a book that asks interesting questions and offers a range of answers, through the characters, for readers to ponder. On the police procedural side, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories treads a similar line, but Marwood’s protagonist is a journalist, which offers a less common ‘way in’ to the investigation along with a less familiar set of challenges.
[If you love Children’s fiction, check out the phenomenal Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke to match this theme (then, if you love it, Charmed Life and Howl’s Moving Castle), plus Jenny Nimmo’s The Rinaldi Ring and Berlie Doherty’s White Peak Farm.]