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It is raining. You have checked, and it is going to rain tomorrow too. The question is not whether you are staying in; the question is which village to stay in, and how many scones are available there.
Here are six, ranked by scone density, which is a measure I have invented and will now defend: the amount of tea, baked goods, and general domestic warmth per murder. High density means you can read it in the bath. Low density means you should probably sit up.
6. Magpie Murders
Magpie Murders
An editor sits down with the manuscript of a bestselling detective novel and finds the last chapters missing, and the author dead. Two whodunits for the price of one, both of them fair.
Lowest scone density on the list, because half the book is a modern publishing story and modern publishing has no scones. But the book-within-the-book is a perfect 1950s village mystery, and the puzzle is honest. Horowitz plays fair twice in one novel, which is showing off, and I respect it.
5. The Appeal
The Appeal
Told entirely in emails and texts, as two law students are handed a bundle of documents and asked to work out who died and who did it. You will make notes. You will be wrong.
Also low on scones, high on passive-aggressive emails from a community theatre, which is its own kind of comfort. You will want a notebook. The pleasure here is being handed the evidence and trusted to work it out, and the sinking feeling, around two-thirds in, that you trusted the wrong email.
4. Still Life
Still Life
Inspector Gamache arrives in Three Pines to find out why a beloved retired teacher was found dead in the woods. The first of a long series, and the one that makes you want to move there, murders notwithstanding.
Three Pines has a bistro, a bookshop, and a poet with a duck. The scone density is high; the melancholy is higher. Penny writes about kindness the way other writers write about weather, as a thing that is simply there. First of a long series, and the first is the right place to start.
3. The Thursday Murder Club
The Thursday Murder Club
Four residents of a retirement village meet on Thursdays to pick over cold cases, until a warm one turns up on their doorstep. Funny, sad, and very good on the people the world has stopped looking at.
The retirement village has a restaurant, a pool, and a resident who used to do something for the government that she won’t discuss. Scone density is very high. The murders are almost beside the point; the point is four people in their seventies refusing to be background characters, and the book is funnier and sadder than it has any right to be.
2. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Flavia de Luce, aged eleven, finds a dying stranger in the cucumber patch and is delighted. The most cheerfully sinister narrator in the genre, with a working knowledge of poisons.
A country house in 1950, a bicycle named Gladys, and an eleven-year-old who would rather be in the chemistry lab, and who, when she finds a man dying in the garden, is mainly pleased. Scone density is high. Poison density is also high, and the two coexist without strain. Flavia is the best narrator on this list and she knows it.
1. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
A sixty-year-old tea shop owner finds a dead man on her floor and decides the police are too slow. She investigates by feeding the suspects until they confess to something. Warm as the kettle.
The highest scone density ever recorded, if you count dumplings, soup, and whatever Vera decides you look like you need. A dead body in a tea shop, a woman who finds the police insufficiently motivated, and a cast of suspects who are gradually adopted. It’s a mystery. It is also a book about feeding people until they feel better, which is, come to think of it, what the whole genre is for.
Order of service
Saturday morning: Vera, with tea. Saturday afternoon: Flavia. Saturday night: The Appeal, with a notebook. Sunday: Still Life, all day. Keep Thursday and Magpie for the next wet weekend. There will be one.