Lizzie Martin Books in Order

The Lizzie Martin novels, also known as the Inspector Ben Ross mysteries, take readers back to Victorian London. Here Ann Granger trades the Cotswold hills for soot, fog and overcrowded streets, following a young woman who keeps stepping beyond the narrow limits society sets for her.

Lizzie Martin first appears in A Rare Interest in Corpses. It is 1864 and she has taken a post as companion to a wealthy widow who also happens to be a slum landlord. Lizzie is quick witted, observant and not inclined to accept pat explanations. When she hears that the previous companion supposedly ran off with a mysterious man, and then the girl's body turns up in demolition rubble near the new St Pancras railway works, she begins to suspect something much darker. Her childhood friend Benjamin Ross, now a Scotland Yard inspector, becomes both ally and bridge into the official world of policing.

The series follows the pair through the later 1860s and early 1870s as they investigate murders that cut across class lines. Their cases take them from respectable drawing rooms to rookeries, from the New Forest to Limehouse, and into places few middle class women of the time were expected to see. The books pay close attention to period detail without slowing the story: new railway stations, rag and bone yards, music halls, workhouses and cramped lodgings all pass under Granger's clear, practical eye.

Lizzie's position is central to the flavour of the series. As a companion and later as a married woman she has more freedom than a maid but far less than a man of her class. She uses what leeway she has to ask questions, visit places where Ben cannot easily go and gain the confidence of other women. At the same time she has to navigate gossip, strict ideas about propriety and the constant risk of being dismissed as meddlesome.

Ben Ross brings a complementary set of tools. Working under the early, rather rigid systems of Scotland Yard, he has to make do without forensic science or modern communications. His work involves long walks, handwritten notes and careful interviews, all under the eye of superiors who do not always welcome initiative. His steady temperament and growing respect for Lizzie's insight keep their partnership on track even when cases become politically sensitive.

Supporting characters give the books additional warmth. Lizzie's formidable Aunt Parry, the couple's sharp eyed maid Bessie and a shifting cast of neighbours, servants and small time crooks build a sense of an ongoing world beyond each individual crime. Later novels take the pair out of London more often, to country houses and forest villages where old grudges and hidden scandals prove just as deadly as anything in the city.

For readers, the Lizzie Martin series offers traditional mysteries wrapped in rich Victorian atmosphere. There are puzzles to solve, villains to unmask and moral compromises to ponder, all seen through the eyes of a woman who refuses to stay quietly in her place when lives are at stake.