The Art of Murder Books in Order

The Art of Murder series is Michael Jecks’s foray into modern amateur-sleuth territory, built around a narrator who would rather be painting than detecting. Nick Morris is a struggling artist who keeps accepting commissions that bring him uncomfortably close to sudden death.

In Portrait of a Murder, Nick agrees to paint the portrait of a volatile hotel owner, Jason Robart. It looks like the kind of job that could pay a few bills and raise his profile. Instead he finds his client dead from a shotgun blast and realises that some of the people around the hotel see him as a convenient outsider to blame.

Landscape of Murder takes him to the Peak District, where a businessman wants a painting of his Georgian house before he sells up. Nick rents a chalet at a nearby holiday park and hopes for quiet days with his easel. A body in the surrounding woods, and a tangle of locals with things to hide, put an end to that plan.

In The Piazza Murders, Nick follows his work to Italy, swapping grey English skies for bright squares and alleyways. Once again death intrudes, this time in a foreign country where he has to navigate unfamiliar police, different social rules and his own fascination with the place.

Across the series, the tone is contemporary and accessible. Nick notices light, colour and composition in every scene, and Jecks uses that eye to anchor the reader in each location. The mysteries grow out of family pressures, financial stress, old grudges and the way small communities react when the police start asking hard questions.

If you like your crime fiction with a creative, slightly reluctant investigator, strong settings and a focus on ordinary people pushed into extraordinary acts, The Art of Murder offers a modern complement to Jecks’s historical work.