ECR Lorac Books in Order

During a foggy drive home from the Fordings Hunt Ball, Nick Brent and Dilys Maine narrowly avoid running over a corpse sprawled in the road. Nick is attacked when he goes to call the police, and an inquiry tangled with an earlier disappearance slowly unravels jealousies and long-held local grudges.

At Valehead House in Devon, an eccentric anthropology professor living in the estate’s cave dwelling is found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Was it carelessness in his curious retreat or a murder arranged to look like an odd accident? Macdonald’s visit to the quiet valley reveals sharper tensions beneath the rural calm.

An audacious criminal dressed as the Devil kills a victim during a bizarre masquerade and then hides the body in Chief Inspector Macdonald’s own car. Forced into a very personal investigation, Macdonald follows a trail of theatrical tricks and calculated bravado to uncover who is taunting the police.

While tracking London coupon‑racketeer Gordon Ginner, Macdonald receives a letter from a Lancashire farmer whose summer cottage has been burgled, with only odd items such as a sack, fishing line and a pair of iron fireplace dogs missing. A rainy Lunesdale weekend brings the two cases together when Ginner’s body is found in the river.

Planning for retirement, Superintendent Macdonald buys a hill farm in the country and installs a young couple to run it while he is still on duty. After a prisoner escapes from Dartmoor and a body is found in the abandoned farmhouse, Macdonald’s quiet future is threatened by one final, intricate case.

In this non‑Macdonald novel, Superintendent Kempson is called in when a woman insists her sister did not simply desert her husband, a retired colonel. As the colonel is later found dead and rumours swirl, Kempson traces how poisonous gossip and half‑truths can lead to more than one death.

In a slightly shabby London house run by the formidable Madame Chevreuse, four young tenants share meals, rent and a growing sense of unease. As accidents and tensions mount inside this “safe” lodging, Macdonald must work out who is turning a respectable home into a truly dangerous domicile.

Taking a rare holiday, Macdonald flies to post‑war Vienna to visit an old friend, determined to stop thinking like a detective. When the English secretary of a retired diplomat is attacked and an English novelist is killed, he is drawn into a case shaped by divided loyalties and a scarred city.

An elderly lady, firmly rooted in Edwardian habits, goes to the police to report that her journalist nephew has vanished. What looks like a routine missing‑person inquiry turns grim when Macdonald uncovers a murder, a menacing St John’s Wood lodging house and witnesses who keep disappearing.

A young man arriving at Paddington Station on a train from Exeter is found with his skull smashed during the lethal Great Smog of 1952. With the victim’s identity concealed and witnesses half‑blind in the fog, Macdonald traces fragile leads between London and Devon to expose a killer.

In the North Devon village of Milham, a much‑admired woman known for tireless charity work is found drowned in the mill race. Chief Inspector Macdonald meets a wall of polite silence as he probes behind the saintly reputation to the divisions and resentments hidden in the community.

A dead man in a burned London lodging house and a cheerful party of sixteen skiers in the Austrian Alps turn out to be linked. Inspector Julian Rivers must follow a faint trail from Bloomsbury boarding house to snowbound slopes to unmask a killer hiding in holiday high spirits.

At Templedean Place in the Cotswolds, the Vanstead family distrusts heir Gerald and his outspoken Australian wife. When the couple die in a car crash and their surviving child later succumbs to apparent misadventure, Macdonald has to decide whether a series of accidents hides a carefully designed plan.

In the Midlands town of Paulborough, dominated by its ancient abbey, a notorious local gossip is discovered dead after spreading stories about leading citizens. Macdonald’s methodical inquiry through choir stalls, vestries and council chambers shows how dangerous a tongue can be when old secrets are at stake.

An irritable, wealthy invalid unexpectedly begins to recover under the care of an attractive nurse, then astonishes his family by proposing marriage. When he dies shortly before the wedding, Macdonald studies uneasy relatives and servants who suddenly face a very different financial future.

During the war, eight writers and travellers accept invitations to what they believe is an exclusive dinner at a famous London French restaurant. When no officials of the supposed club appear and a body is found at the end of the evening, Macdonald must untangle hoax, motive and opportunity among the guests.

A demobbed ATS girl takes a promising job in a Regent Street café and persuades a friend to join her. Their new life quickly sours when they are drawn into a case of poisoning and blackmail, and Macdonald must decide who is victim, who is dupe and who is killer.

Late in the Second World War, a quiet ex‑naval officer rents a thatched cottage on a Devon estate, hoping to make a new start as a market gardener. When he dies in a suspicious fire amid local schemes for a luxury hotel, Macdonald must decide whether the blaze was tragic accident or calculated murder.

On a blackout night in Regent’s Park, a passer‑by sees a man struck down, lit only by the flare of a match. The victim’s identity proves slippery, leading Macdonald to a theatrical boarding house, black‑market dealings and air‑raid chaos where truth and imposture are hard to separate.

On a remote Lancashire farm during wartime, domineering patriarch Robert Garth is discovered dead among his beloved cattle. Called north from Scotland Yard, Macdonald has to read the rhythms of farm work, inheritance worries and family quarrels before he can identify which of the Garths had murder in mind.

During a foggy evening in the London Blitz, an artist’s studio in Hampstead hosts a portrait sitting and a tense chess game. Next door, an elderly man is found shot and his Canadian soldier nephew arrested, but Macdonald’s investigation into the studio’s occupants and a zealous special constable shows the case is far from simple.

An American cousin visiting a long‑shuttered St John’s Wood villa owned by the Hazely family stumbles over a body at the foot of a staircase. As Macdonald investigates, it becomes clear the supposedly abandoned house has been in clandestine use, and several people had reason to keep that fact hidden.

Veronica Mallowood summons her scattered relatives back to Wulfstane Manor to discuss the future of their crumbling country house. The family conference ends with her brother found hanged in what looks like suicide, but Macdonald’s patient questioning reveals bitter quarrels, financial pressures and a carefully staged death.

The sudden collapse of elderly Reverend Anderby while hosing his garden seems natural enough, until a second unexpected death unsettles a small market town. Called in from Scotland Yard, Macdonald follows the trail through a local clinic, medical tensions and village loyalties to find a quiet but ruthless murderer.

In a quiet English village, a reclusive figure nicknamed “Black Beadle” is found murdered, his odd habits and shadowy past suddenly of intense interest to his neighbours. Macdonald has to pick apart rivalries, gossip and long‑standing fears to learn who decided the beadle’s secrets were worth killing for.

A gloomy London house divided into flats is linked by an old central staircase that binds the tenants’ lives together. When elderly Miss Fanny Seeley falls to her death, echoing a similar recent tragedy, Macdonald wonders which of the residents is using the stairs as a perfect cover for murder.

Invited to a publisher’s party in London, Macdonald joins a group of writers playing an elaborate treasure hunt, each hiding behind the name of a famous author. When a bestselling crime novelist is found dead, the playful literary clues become the key to unmasking a very real killer.

Bruce Attleton, once a rising novelist, vanishes after a strange phone call from a man named Debrette. His suitcase and papers later surface in a derelict Notting Hill studio called the Belfry, where Macdonald’s search through bohemian studios, bad marriages and possible inheritances leads to a chillingly concealed corpse.

The Surrays are a high‑achieving family of writers and professionals, so novelist Ruth’s apparent suicide at their Oxfordshire home shocks everyone. When her brother receives a cheerful letter posted the night she died, Macdonald reopens the case and finds ambition, jealousy and literary politics beneath the family’s polished surface.

During the 1935 General Election in a Lancashire mining town, a communist agitator is murdered on his way to break up a Conservative meeting. Macdonald’s inquiry into the killing is complicated when a nationalist politician launches his own private “investigation,” turning political rivalries into a dangerous second front.

A young woman who runs a Chelsea bookshop is discovered gassed in her bed, apparently a tragic suicide. When inconsistencies emerge, Macdonald turns a sympathetic eye on her friends, customers and co‑workers, uncovering hidden pressures and motives in the small world built around the shop.

Colonel Marchand is found dead from cyanide poisoning soon after entertaining a pretty young visitor to tea. With a household of wary servants, a hard‑pressed secretary and a spendthrift heir all in line for suspicion, Macdonald must sift their stories to learn who decided the colonel had lived long enough.

On a dark stretch of the Oxford Road, a body is dumped from a speeding car, only for the killers to be spotted by Macdonald himself. What begins as a chance encounter grows into a patient reconstruction of a calculated murder disguised as a roadside accident.

When brilliant research chemist Ian Campbell disappears just as he makes a breakthrough in synthetic fuel, suspicion falls on treachery and foreign agents. Macdonald teams up with industrialist Sir Henry Blakely to follow false trails from London lodgings to a Yorkshire laboratory before confronting the conspirators.