Ngaio Marsh

"The bad news: This is the last in Ngaio Marsh's marvelous Inspector Alleyn series. The good: It's one of her very best. The secret to Light Thickens success may lie in its combination of some of Marsh's greatest passions, including her native New Zealand in the person of, unusually, a Maori character and the theater. Indeed, the plot centers on a production of well, let's skirt disaster by calling it the Scottish play, a play that Dame Ngaio produced...

A British tour group in Italy finds murder is an obstacle to their sightseeing: “Fastidious writing [and] a fine appreciation of place.” —Sunday Times
A group of well-to-do tourists is visiting Italy’s magnificent churches, but they’ve found themselves stumbling into an unholy web of blackmail and drug-smuggling—and, in the depths of a Roman basilica, murder. Fortunately Inspector Roderick Alleyn...

A local busybody is silenced for good in this tale by "a peerless practitioner of the slightly surreal, English-village comedy-mystery" (Kirkus Reviews).
In their Dorset village, neither Miss Campanula nor her friend Miss Prentice are known as lovable little old ladies. They're waspish, gossiping snobby little old ladies, passionate only about their amateur theatrical productions, their narrowly defined opinions about how everyone...

Ng'ombwana is a (fictional) African nation to have emerged in the wake of colonialism; as it happens, its President is Inspector Alleyn's old school chum, the "Boomer."

A high-society homicide is the talk of the London season . . ."Marsh's writing is a pleasure." —The Seattle Times
It's debutante season in London, and that means giggles and tea-dances, white dresses and inappropriate romances . . ..and much too much champagne. And, apparently, a blackmailer, which is where Inspector Roderick Alleyn comes in. The social whirl is decidedly not Alleyn's environment, so he brings in an assistant...

In the movies, it's known as a "meet cute." But for Inspector Alleyn and Miss Agatha Troy, it's more like irritation: On the ship back to England, she finds him tedious and dull; he thinks she's a bohemian cliché. They may be destined for romance, but there's a murder in the way: No sooner has Alleyn settled in to his mother's house, eager for a relaxing end to his vacation, then he gets a call that a model has been stabbed at the artists' community...

A mystery with "atmosphere, humor . . .and a group of characters, English, Maori, and New Zealander, who are fascinating and completely credible." —The New York Times
During World War II, Colonel Claire—a tremendously nice fellow and a disastrously bad businessman—runs a mud-baths resort in rural New Zealand. But the place is on the brink of being taken over by a local blowhard who may be a Nazi spy. Inspector Alleyn has...

"A shabby, fourth-rate theater, the Vulcan is not where Martyn Tarne hoped to work, when she moved from New Zealand to London in hope of a glittering acting career. But a girl has to eat, so Martyn takes a job as dresser to the Vulcan's leading lady. This provides her with a ringside seat to the backstage circus: the aging alcoholic actor, the waspish playwright, the ingénue on the make, the surprisingly gracious grande dame. There is, of course,...

Folkways turn fatal in a very old-fashioned English village, in this witty mystery filled with "ingenious" detective work (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. The very old ways. This may be 1957, but South Mardian still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. There's squabbling, of course, and worse—like when one of...

"Of all the books in the Alleyn series, Scales of Justice is most powerfully reminiscent of Agatha Christie, with its setting in an almost unspeakably charming little English village, and its cast of inbred aristocrats. When one of the aristos turns up dead next to the local trout-stream --with, in fact, a trout at his side--everyone is dreadfully upset, of course, but really, just a tad irritated as well: Murder is so awfully messy. Thank gawd that...