100 books like An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed

Lemony Snicket is no stranger to unfortunate events, but this standalone book contains perhaps the worst of all: the news that he, the author, has consumed poison while eating the first meal of the day. Of course, this being a Snicket story, there’s more going on. This book is a bit mystery, and a bit philosophy (or is it the other way around?). More importantly, it is also a meditation on the wonderfulness of books and reading, a part of life that remains important even if one is quite sure one has been poisoned and now has an indeterminate amount of time to discover the truth of what happened.

If you aren’t ready for Scandinavian Noir, perhaps you’d like a dose of Scandinavian Blanc. Alexander McCall Smith excels at mysteries on the lighter side—which isn’t to say this book isn’t very strange, with its own hints of darkness. Detective Ulf Varg and his colleagues solve crimes that are deemed too weird for the regular police: a possible werewolf menacing a spa, a non-lethal knee-stabbing, and a missing (imaginary) person. AMS’s great gift is imbuing small puzzles with weight and humanity. And if the human cast here isn’t off-kilter enough for you, be reassured…there’s also a dog who can lipread in Swedish.

Did you know that Ray Bradbury wrote mysteries? He wrote a few toward the end of his career, and they’re set in the deeply weird world of Southern California, which immediately makes them off-kilter. Death is a Lonely Business follows a nameless protagonist—a writer, by the way—who gets drawn into a mysterious series of…Disappearances? Murders? Perhaps just bad luck? Filled with noir-inspired settings but with that ineffable Bradbury twist of the fantastic, this is a book for late nights and nostalgia. Strange and puzzling, and always ready to twist your expectations.

Flashback to a classic. Not enough people know about the Mysterious Mr. Quin stories by Agatha Christie. They have all the glamour of Poirot, but they’re not quite whodunits. Or are they? Despite the fact that crime is solved in each, they’re a little weird and magical and even melancholy. Our “detective” Mr. Satterthwaite seems to find himself near death over and over, and each time his acquaintance Mr. Quin (who bears a lot of resemblance to the tragic Harlequin figure of commedia dell’arte) arrives to help him to find his way to the truth. Each story is super short, so they’re good for when you can’t muster attention for a marathon reading session. Worth seeking out!

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor is the first of Stephanie Barron’s 14 Jane Austen mysteries, based on Austen’s “discovered” diaries about her adventures as a sleuth.  The series’ witty tone is true to Austen’s, and portrayals of Austen’s family are based in fact. In this opening volume, Jane is visiting a friend “of more fashion than means” newly married a middle aged earl—who dies, poisoned, after a celebratory party. His will divides his estate between his countess and an heir known to be too fond of her, making the pair obvious suspects. As Jane works to prove her friend innocent, the descriptions of aristocratic Regency life, dress, manners, and law are superb. 

When I met my husband’s family a couple of decades back, his cousin told me: “You’ll never survive a relationship with a Swede if you do not know what “Lagom” is ”Lagom is our way of life.”

“Lagom” could be translated as “the right balance.” It means not too much and not too little. It can apply to work or to alcohol consumption. The Swedes often say “Lagom är bäst,” “Lagom is best”.

With a great sense of humour, Everdahl sheds an interesting light on Swedish culture. You’ll never see the Vikings the same way after this read!

A young girl lives in secret on a lonely Danish island – some time earlier, hoping to protect his daughter from the outside world, her father faked her death. And so she lives, with her increasingly infirm mother, the imagined ghost of her dead brother, and her (as we eventually discover) totally insane father, in a house of accumulated rubbish and rodents. 

I met Ane Riel at a festival in Sweden a couple of years ago and liked her enormously, so was very keen to read her award-winning book. I wasn’t disappointed. It is a deeply original and truly disturbing story.

This is one of the few novels that genuinely scared me. I was so tense during the first half of the book when the friends were hiking in a remote Swedish wilderness and being hunted by… something. Nevill does an amazing job of keeping the tension through this part of the book pulled so taut that I was mesmerized.

Then I was completely caught out by the turn the novel takes around the middle and it started to appeal to everything I love about folk horror and the supernatural, and it appealed to my love of heavy music. One of my all-time favourite books, I didn’t want it to end.

Taking place in northern Sweden, where the cold and snowy environment plays its own part, this story focuses on a cult-like church where the founder has been brutally murdered. A lawyer and friend of the victim’s sister, Rebecka Martinsson, travels up from Stockholm to help solve the case. It’s dark and gritty and suspenseful – it’s also the first of 6 books. 

Recent genetic research on the human remains of a 10th-century Viking grave excavated in 1878 in Birka, Sweden, rocked the world of Viking studies when it determined that the warrior buried with numerous weapons and two horses was not male, but female. I loved how this author imagines what that woman’s life might have been like. She also suggests that the woman buried in the Birka grave was merely one of many female Viking warriors, offering data drawn from archaeological finds, from historical accounts, from language studies, and from the sagas to support the theory that ‘shield maids’ really did exist. I had been dubious about the possibility of female Vikings, but the arguments presented in this book are too compelling. Reading it changed my mind. Now I’m a believer.