AG Barnett Books in Order

If you want a village police procedural: An Occupied Grave → A Staged Death → When The Party Died
If you prefer a lighter comic mystery: An Invitation to Murder → A Death at Dinner → Lightning Strikes Twice
If you like locked-room puzzles and deeper character arcs: An Occupied Grave → Murder in a Watched Room

AG Barnett grew up in North Devon, England, and later moved to Oxfordshire, where he lives with his wife, daughter, three ridiculous spaniels, and four frizzle chickens.

He writes mysteries because he loves them.

Barnett has said that a long affection for Agatha Christie and the golden age of detective fiction pushed him toward writing crime stories of his own. That influence shows up in the shape of the books. He likes a clear puzzle, a strong opening hook, and the slow satisfaction of watching a case come together clue by clue.

Two central strands of his fiction are the Brock and Poole novels and the Mary Blake mysteries. Between them, they give a good sense of his range. One side is modern police work in small English communities. The other is lighter, funnier, and built around a former television star learning how to solve murders without a script.

In An Occupied Grave, readers meet Detective Inspector Sam Brock and Detective Sergeant Guy Poole, a pair of investigators working in and around Bexford. Later books such as Murder in a Watched Room keep that partnership at the center, mixing village secrets, personal history, and puzzle-heavy cases. Barnett seems drawn to detectives who feel fallible, decent, and a bit worn by life.

He clearly likes a good premise.

The Mary Blake books take a different route. An Invitation to Murder, A Death at Dinner, and Lightning Strikes Twice follow a once-famous actress whose career falters just as real crimes start landing on her doorstep. Mary, along with her brother Pea and her assistant Dot, gives Barnett room for more humor and warmth. The mysteries are still proper whodunnits, but they also have the pleasure of watching a woman reinvent herself in public.

His wider bibliography shows that he is comfortable moving around within the mystery tradition. He has written modern procedurals, amateur-sleuth stories, and historical whodunnits, including books like The Will of the Standing Stones and The Staircase. What connects them is less the time period than the method. Barnett returns again and again to enclosed communities, old grudges, public masks, and the trouble caused when a buried truth starts pushing back to the surface.

Readers have responded to that mix. His books have sold more than 150,000 copies and reached readers in over 80 countries. That tells you something useful about the appeal. These are recognizably English mysteries, full of villages, hotels, museums, and country houses, but the pleasures are universal: a strong setup, a knot of suspects, and the quiet click of a solution that feels earned rather than forced.

Place seems to matter to him too. North Devon and Oxfordshire are not treated as tourist postcards in his work, but the rhythms of English local life are everywhere. People know one another too well, histories overlap, and private embarrassments rarely stay private for long. Even when the tone is cosy, the social pressure can be surprisingly sharp. These days Barnett is still based in Oxfordshire and still writing crime fiction. The details of his home life, dogs, chickens, family, make him sound like someone who understands both order and chaos. That feels about right for a writer of tidy murder puzzles.