Elly Griffiths Books in Order

Banned from time travel after a colleague vanished in Victorian London, Ali Dawson distracts herself by probing a run of apparent suicides among young men who believed a psychic could make them fly. A reckless attempt to alter a small moment for her missing cat instead catapults Ali back into the past, where old enemies and new murders wait in the fog.

Ali Dawson leads a covert cold case unit whose members travel back in time to gather evidence from long dead crime scenes. Sent to 1850s London to clear an aristocratic patron’s ancestor, Ali is trapped in a frozen Victorian winter while, in the present, her son Finn faces a murder charge that may be tangled with the same sinister circle of men.

This collection gathers short mysteries and ghostly tales featuring many of Elly Griffiths’ best loved characters, including Ruth Galloway, Harry Nelson, Max Mephisto, Harbinder Kaur and Justice Jones. From Norfolk legends to festive vignettes and eerie standalones, the book offers bite sized glimpses into familiar worlds and experiments with different voices and moods.

In Shoreham, octogenarian Edwin and Ukrainian born Natalka run a small detective agency that mostly handles dull disputes, until local romance writer Melody Chambers dies and her daughters cry murder. As links emerge to an obituary writer and a sinister writers’ retreat, the pair turn to DI Harbinder Kaur when their undercover work puts them squarely in the killer’s sights.

Builders renovating a King’s Lynn café uncover a skeleton bricked up behind a wall, and Ruth Galloway quickly realises the bones are recent. Identified as missing archaeology student Emily Pickering, the case points back to a long ago field trip involving Ruth’s friend Cathbad, whose sudden disappearance forces Nelson’s team to race the clock to clear his name and catch a killer.

In 1966, magician Max Mephisto is stopped outside a London hospital by an old colleague, Ted English, known on stage as the Great Deceiver. Ted’s assistant has been found dead in her Brighton boarding house, and as Max and Superintendent Edgar Stephens investigate, more showgirls die and a sinister radio personality and music hall crowd come under deadly scrutiny.

War has just broken out and Highbury House now shares its building with an evacuated boys’ school, to the horror and delight of its pupils. When Justice Jones and new friend Henry hear disembodied voices and spot a face at an impossible window, rumours of spies and saboteurs send Justice into her most dangerous investigation yet.

While clearing her late mother’s London flat, Ruth Galloway finds an old photograph of her Norfolk cottage labelled with a stranger’s name and date. Back home, as Covid lockdown begins and Nelson quietly investigates a cluster of suspicious female “suicides”, an unsettling new neighbour and buried family connections turn Ruth’s supposedly safe isolation into something far more dangerous.

Newly promoted DI Harbinder Kaur joins the Met in London just as a prominent MP drops dead at his elite school reunion. His former classmates, including one of Harbinder’s colleagues, share a long buried secret about another death on the railway tracks, and unpicking their overlapping stories leads to fresh murder in a historic courtyard known as Bleeding Heart Yard.

The Night Hawks, a group of metal detectorists, discover both an ancient hoard and a dead man on a North Norfolk beach. When a supposed murder-suicide at a lonely farmhouse and talk of the spectral Black Shuck dog join the mix, Ruth Galloway and Nelson find every path leading back to a bleak property that seems cursed for anyone who enters.

In 1965 Rottingdean, ageing theatre impresario Bert Billington dies and his glamorous ex music hall star wife is accused of poisoning him. Former detective Emma Holmes and journalist Sam Collins, now trying to run a private agency, investigate alongside the police, with Max Mephisto and young WPC Meg Connolly drawn into a case steeped in old grudges and buried abuse.

Now in her third year at Highbury House, Justice Jones is unsettled by Letitia, a confident new girl who seems to charm teachers and ignore rules. After a midnight feast, a ghostly sighting and Letitia’s apparent disappearance, ransom notes torn from a crime novel send Justice racing to find her classmate before a childish game turns deadly.

Back at Highbury House for spring term, Justice Jones is assigned to visit Mr Arthur, an elderly gentleman living alone at Smugglers’ Lodge on the marsh. Rumours of ghosts, a strangely unqualified new matron and Mr Arthur’s sudden, suspicious death send Justice and her friends hunting for answers in tunnels, cellars and school corridors.

Ninety-year-old Peggy Smith dies in her seaside flat, apparently of natural causes, but her carer Natalka notices suspicious details and a shelf of crime novels she helped plot as an uncredited “murder consultant”. With Benedict and Edwin in tow and DS Harbinder Kaur trying to keep up, the trio follow clues from Shoreham to book festivals, discovering that Peggy’s quiet life hid dangerous stories.

Now working in Cambridge with a new partner, Ruth Galloway is reluctant to return to police work until convicted killer Ivor March offers to reveal where he buried more victims, but only if she does the digging. Drawn back to the fens, Ruth and Nelson confront eerie legends of lantern men luring travellers to their deaths and a manipulative murderer who may still be orchestrating events from his cell.

DCI Nelson begins receiving anonymous letters urging him to “go to the stone circle”, echoing the notes that haunted his first case with Ruth Galloway. On a new henge dig in the Saltmarsh, Ruth uncovers the bones of a missing child, and past and present investigations tangle as old griefs and loyalties resurface around a family who lost a daughter decades ago.

Brighton, 1963: Superintendent Edgar Stephens struggles with swing era policing while his wife, former detective Emma, feels stifled as a housewife. When a schoolgirl from Roedean, a trainee nurse and a local mod girl all disappear, Edgar’s team, ambitious WPC Meg Connolly and the glamorous Ruby Magic are pulled into a case where fame, fandom and danger collide.

After her crime-writer mother dies, twelve-year-old Justice Jones is sent to Highbury House, a remote boarding school on the Romney Marshes. When she hears that a maid has recently died in odd circumstances and a snowstorm cuts them off, Justice uses her wits, notebooks and midnight explorations to uncover a murderer within the school walls.

English teacher Clare Cassidy is writing about a long dead Gothic author when a colleague is murdered, the body staged with a line from his most famous story. As DS Harbinder Kaur investigates, entries appear in Clare’s private diary in a stranger’s hand, blurring the line between fiction and reality in a case steeped in ghost stories and obsession.

Restless in Norfolk and her strained relationship with Nelson, Ruth Galloway accepts an invitation to consult on Roman bones in a hill town in Italy. An earthquake, the suspicious death of a local priest and buried stories from the wartime Resistance draw Ruth, and later Nelson, into a mystery far from home that still manages to threaten the people they love.

Sophie is proud of her quarter Italian heritage and the larger than life grandfather who brought it to London. When a journalist digs into his wartime record, she follows a trail from nineteenth century Naples to wartime Little Italy and a long forgotten tragedy, uncovering uncomfortable truths about both family legend and herself.

Christmas 1953 finds Max Mephisto and his daughter Ruby headlining a Brighton show that shares a stage with a risqué tableau act of “living statues”. When a young flower seller linked to the troupe is found posed like a piece of art in a boarding house, DI Edgar Stephens must work out how a killer is using theatrical illusion to hide in plain sight.

Human bones boiled and cut open are found in Norwich’s network of disused chalk mines, and Ruth Galloway confirms they are disturbingly recent. As Nelson probes the deaths of homeless men and the disappearance of a local mother, rumours of an underground community and whispered talk of cannibalism force the team into the dark beneath the city.

When a recovering addict is found strangled near the pilgrimage village of Walsingham, Cathbad swears he saw her earlier dressed as the Virgin Mary in a graveyard. As Ruth’s old friend, now a female priest, receives vicious anonymous letters, Nelson’s team must sift religious fervour, local grudges and relics to stop a killer fixated on women in blue.

On the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, DI Edgar Stephens learns that his former wartime commander has been murdered, a playing card – the ace of hearts, the blood card – left as a clue. While Max Mephisto prepares for a lavish coronation variety show, the pair uncover anarchist plots, fortune tellers and a plan that could turn a day of celebration into disaster.

A buried American bomber is unearthed in a Norfolk field, the cockpit containing a skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull. Ruth Galloway and Nelson discover the dead man was a local aristocrat long believed drowned at sea, and soon the decaying airfields known as the “ghost fields” are at the centre of fresh attacks and family secrets.

In a snowy Brighton winter, two children vanish on their way to buy sweets and later turn up murdered in a macabre tableau. DI Edgar Stephens’ hunt for the killer draws in his friend Max Mephisto, a pantomime production and unsettling echoes of an older crime obsessed with the darker side of fairy tales.

Brighton, 1950: when a young woman’s dismembered body is found arranged like a stage illusion, DI Edgar Stephens is reminded of the Zig Zag Girl trick created by his old army friend, magician Max Mephisto. Reunited, the pair follow a trail that reaches back to their secret wartime “Magic Men” unit, where someone seems intent on finishing an old performance in blood.

Ruth Galloway excavates the remains of Jemima Green, a Victorian childminder hanged as the infamous “Mother Hook” for murdering children in her care. As a TV crew turns the case into lurid entertainment and Nelson investigates a modern mother whose babies have died, a kidnapper calling themselves the Childminder forces everyone to reconsider who is truly guilty.

It is Ruth Galloway’s first Christmas as a single mother, and she is determined to give her toddler Kate a proper celebration despite her own dislike of the season. Between a misjudged tree purchase, awkward social obligations and a small mystery that lands on her doorstep, Ruth discovers that even quiet holidays can turn unexpectedly complicated and hopeful.

When Ruth Galloway learns that an old university friend has died in a suspicious fire, she also receives his letter about a sensational archaeological discovery that might be linked to King Arthur. Travelling north with her daughter, Ruth stumbles into academic rivalries, far right extremists and dangerous myths that still stir people to violence.

On a rapidly eroding Norfolk beach, Ruth Galloway helps uncover a mass grave of six men shot during the Second World War. As Nelson’s team digs into Home Guard legends and village loyalties, it becomes clear that someone alive will do anything to keep old wartime betrayals from coming to light.

Asked to attend the ceremonial opening of a medieval bishop’s coffin, Ruth Galloway instead finds the museum curator dead beside it. When the wealthy owner of the collection also dies and Aboriginal skulls, drug smuggling and threatening letters surface, Ruth and Nelson must work out how far some people will go to profit from bones.

Builders demolishing an old house in Norwich uncover the skeleton of a child beneath a doorway, the skull missing. Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson trace the property’s history from private home to children’s refuge, unpicking forgotten scandals and long silences as someone tries to frighten Ruth off a truth that links past and present.

When a child’s bones are found on the Norfolk salt marshes, forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is asked to determine their age. The remains are ancient, but anonymous letters, an unsolved abduction and a new missing girl drag Ruth into DCI Harry Nelson’s decade long hunt for a killer who understands ritual and the landscape all too well.

Patricia runs an idyllic sounding writers’ retreat in a crumbling Tuscan castle, but looming bills mean this summer could be her last. As a motley group of aspiring authors arrive with tangled personal lives, romance, rivalries, ghosts and local gossip make it a season that will change the castello, and Patricia, for good.

Emily Robertson seems to have it all, from a lovingly restored Tuscan farmhouse to three children and a successful husband. When he ends their marriage by text, she is left broke, overwhelmed and stranded in the countryside, and must rebuild her life with the help of prickly neighbours, village secrets and an unexpected second chance at love.

Gaby de Angelis has long been her father Enzo’s favourite daughter, so his sudden death on the day her own child is born shatters her neat life. Fulfilling his wish to have his ashes scattered in Rome throws Gaby back into the chaos of her extended Italian family and face to face with the man she once thought she would marry.

Sophie Di Napoli has always idolised her fiery Italian grandfather Cesare, patriarch of a London family whose roots lie in old Naples. When a journalist hints at dark secrets in Cesare’s wartime past, Sophie joins him on a journey through Italy and Clerkenwell that forces her to confront buried history and her own ideas about love and loyalty.

This compact companion explores how food and feasting appear in Shakespeare’s plays, linking famous scenes and speeches to the dishes, table manners and festive customs of his time, and offering a flavour of the kitchens and banquets behind the drama.