Diana Porteous Books in Order

Diana Porteous enters this series in Gold Digger under a cloud of suspicion that never fully lifts, which is exactly what makes her interesting. She is the much younger wife of Thomas Porteous, an elderly art collector dying in a vast old schoolhouse by the sea. Diana loves him, mourns him, and inherits his paintings, but the family around them assumes the worst. They see an interloper and a fortune hunter. Fyfield makes sure the reader can see why, because Di really did first come into Thomas's life as a thief.

That mix of tenderness, opportunism, guilt, and survival powers the whole series. Diana is not a clean, upright amateur sleuth. She has good instincts, quick nerves, and a criminal past that never quite stops being useful. She also has real feeling, especially where Thomas, his collection, and his stepgrandson Patrick are concerned. After Thomas dies, his daughters circle the inheritance, old resentments flare up, and Di has to defend not only her future but her version of the truth. The question is not whether she is innocent. It is whether innocence is even the right measure for a character like this.

That ambiguity is the point.

In Casting the First Stone, the series opens out. Di is stuck in grief and drifting until Sarah Fortune is brought into her orbit, and the two women make a sharp, lively pair. What begins as an effort to recover stolen paintings becomes a deeper game involving a secretive young collector, illicit treasures, and the old house by the sea that still holds more than memories. Di is good at reading weakness, appetite, and bluff, and those talents matter as much as any clue. These books are less about procedure than about leverage.

A Painted Smile keeps that mood going and adds another layer of art, family, and performance. A portrait exhibition planned for the school's cellar gives Di a project and a purpose, but soon there is a mysterious woman urging theft from a public collection, an artist's death, and more questions about what belongs to whom. Patrick's presence also matters. He helps keep the books from becoming purely cynical, because his affection for Di, and hers for him, gives the series an emotional centre that greed alone cannot flatten.

The setting does a lot of work here. The house by the sea, the cellar, the paintings, and the strange family arrangements all create a world that feels both elegant and unstable. These are crime novels full of inheritance wars, art-world temptation, chosen loyalties, and people who are clever enough to talk themselves into almost anything.

If you like suspense with a thief's eye for value and a widow's eye for danger, Diana Porteous is a very good place to spend a few books.