Books like The Moving Finger: 36 fan favorites

Harriet Vane, a thinly disguised Sayers (who it seemed had fallen in love with her fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey), gets her own book where she goes back to Oxford to the women’s college she graduated from, to help uncover a mystery.

There is a delight in the fact that the female can be as deadly as the male, offering up a new sort of equality. This became a lovely television series starring Harriet Walter, but the book is rich and wonderful and sprinkled with untranslated Greek. You feel smarter, just holding it; it made me really wish I’d tried harder to qualify for a Rhodes scholarship back in the day.

Born Constance Lloyd and buried as Constance Holland, she is most widely known as Constance Wilde, wife of playwright and martyr Oscar Wilde.

For all that is written about Oscar and the trouble he found exploring his homosexuality in the 1890s, this fresh perspective on the obscured wife is invaluable. A daughter, sister, and mother, Constance was also an author, an activist, and (as suits the one name she never changed) a faithful friend.

Drawing on hundreds of unpublished letters, this book demystifies a woman overshadowed. Know the important work she did to free women of the confines and fatal dangers of the previous century’s dresses. Feel the heartbreak of a ruinous marriage—the man who betrayed her, and the children she couldn’t protect. Remember Constance, because she mattered too.

The second of The House at Baker Street series, this book solves the mystery of why a disproportionate number of patients are dying in a private ward at St. Barts hospital in London.

Atmospheric and engaging, Birkby’s writing develops Mrs. Hudson and Mary Watson in practical, unsentimental ways while not ignoring their emotions, or how those feelings motivate them. These are two adults with unique histories and strengths, and they develop a bond equivalent to an aunt and niece after Mary becomes Mrs. Watson, and joins the cast of characters that frequent Mrs. Hudson’s 221B home.

These women are not vehicles for a Holmes and Watson storyline—the men are almost completely absent. These ladies are two fully realized characters with their own cases to solve and innocents to save.

A real-life figure played in the Gentleman Jack TV series by Suranne Jones, this biography investigates Anne Lister’s personal diaries to reveal a portrait of someone remarkable: a businesswoman landowner in the early 1800s, a world traveler, and a lover of women long before the word “lesbian” would have accurately described her.

Lister’s boldness seems ahead of her time, but perhaps only because women were so rarely free to express themselves. Lister’s numerous liaisons with women, her plans to make and grow her fortune, plus her documentation of her digestive health, all make her relatable over 200 years later.

This is an important piece of LGBT and gender studies history, a bright chronicle in the archives of feminist study, and an interesting read about an extraordinary person.

Detective Tom Shawn interrupts a young woman’s suicide attempt. She professes to know a man that predicts the future, including her father's death. The clairvoyant man predicts his own death, but Detective Shawn suspects foul play.

I enjoyed this story. I could not figure out until the end whether most of the events were within the woman’s runaway imagination, a series of happenstances, or whether the clairvoyant man was the killer. The author slowly peels back a few layers as the story progresses, but there always seems to be more, leading to a surprise ending.

My all-time favorite amateur detective is Miss Marple, and if I had to pick a favorite book she is in, it would be this one. I love the idea of a quiet, mostly ignored spinster who most people dismiss being the one character who seems to know exactly what is going on and what people are up to.

I really like the way Miss Marple figures out why the main character thinks she is going mad and proves that she isn’t. In this book, Miss Marple really proves her status as one of the best amateur detectives, and I love it.

This is a book series that poses mysteries that are short and fun to solve. The answers are not insultingly easy, nor are they so hard or obscure that kids can’t solve them. The main character is very likable and is described in a way that makes you feel like he is a kid you would want to be friends with.

Amateur sleuths tend to be drawn from the professional or upper classes—Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, even my own Hon Cressida Fawcett—so it’s refreshing to solve cases with Lena Szarka, a Hungarian cleaner who has a clear moral compass and a way of finding out exactly what’s lurking in the dirty laundry—both literal and metaphorical. Headstrong, big of heart, and desperate to solve the death of her friend, Lena can spot a smudgy fingerprint at fifty paces. This book is the first in a limited series and well worth settling down with—just put a coaster under your mug and pick up your own biscuit crumbs, else Lena might have a word…

Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope, while driving home during a blizzard, becomes disorientated and loses her way on the backcountry roads of Northumberland in England. Off the beaten track she finds a car abandoned, one door open, and a baby in the back seat. I can’t imagine anything more alarming. Where are the mother and father? When she takes the child with her, Vera realizes she is mere feet from her father’s ancestral home. Hector was the black sheep of the Stanhope Clan. The place is lit up and welcoming but Vera’s cousin was not expecting her, but invited guests for a dinner party and certainly not a baby. Then to discover the child’s mother murdered on their grounds. I fell in love with Vera in the first book and want to be just like her when I grow up. I like the police procedural rhythm of these books and… show more.

I've read a few of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels and I have to say this was probably my favorite. I found Reacher’s humor a little drier in this one, and there was a lot less of Child's sometimes painfully slow narrative.

I liked the characters and the plot moved well, with a couple of cool twists to keep you guessing right until the end. For me, it was a fun read!