Ethelred and Elsie Books in Order

Struggling crime writer Ethelred Tressider is already battling deadlines and his formidable agent when his ex-wife disappears near his Sussex home. Once the case turns to murder, Elsie pushes him into an investigation that also tests his own story.

Ethelred is supposed to have died in a plane explosion, but Elsie tracks him to a shabby French hotel full of stamp collectors. Then guests start dying, and she has to untangle the case before more bodies appear.

A country-house dinner ends with the host dead in his locked study and the police calling it suicide. Ethelred and Elsie are not convinced, especially once it becomes clear that nearly everyone present is hiding something.

Hoping research will revive his career, Ethelred takes Elsie on a Nile cruise and walks straight into danger. An attack on his life, an exploding engine, and a murder aboard turn the trip into a tight, floating whodunit.

A fellow crime writer fears he killed another author during a drunken New Year's Eve blackout. Ethelred and Elsie soon realize the case is less about confession than about who set him up, and why.

What looks like a drunken sailing death turns messier when the dead man's fiancee accuses an entire village of murder. Ethelred and Elsie pick through grudges, ex-lovers, and local schemes to find out who really wanted Robin Pagham gone.

At a memorial for a vanished celebrity biographer's subject, Ethelred unexpectedly meets the supposedly dead man himself, or someone claiming to be him. The return unleashes inheritance battles, old secrets, and a fresh run of violence.

A disliked academic comes to Sussex chasing a legendary golden statue hidden in old religious houses. When he is killed, Ethelred and Elsie must sort treasure lore, local history, and present-day greed into a workable solution.

Ethelred and Elsie head to a remote creative writing course, then snow traps the guests inside. When one of them vanishes and a grisly body turns up, they have to find the killer without help from the police.