The 14 Best Cosy Mysteries, Ranked From Softest to Sharpest

Precious Ramotswe inherits cattle from her father, sells them, and does the thing nobody in Gaborone expects: she opens a detective agency with a kettle, two desks and no training at all. The cases are small and local. A husband who has vanished, a father who might not be the father, a girl missing from her village. One strand in here is genuinely frightening, and McCall Smith handles it in about four pages and then lets the kettle boil again. Mostly this is a book about a woman who is good at her work and kind to people while she does it.

Jim Qwilleran is a newspaperman on the way down, handed the art column as a last chance, when people around the city's gallery scene start dying. He acquires Koko, a Siamese with strong opinions, who scratches at particular books and knocks particular objects off shelves until Qwilleran works out what he has been told. This is the book the entire pet sleuth industry grew out of, and you can feel 1966 in every chapter: the typewriters, the smoking, the way women get described. It is short, silly and oddly restful.

Agatha Raisin sells her public relations firm, buys a cottage in the Cotswolds, and learns that village life does not simply hand you friends because you have arrived. So she enters the local quiche competition with a quiche she bought in London, the judge eats it and dies, and now she has to prove she is a fraud but not a murderer. Beaton's joke is that her heroine is rude, vain, pushy and lonely, which makes her much better company than the usual sweet amateur sleuth. The village is drawn with a cold eye and the plot is light enough for one sitting.

Judith Potts lives alone in a large house on the Thames at Marlow, sets crosswords for the papers and swims in the river with no costume on. She hears a gunshot from a neighbour's garden, reports it, and is politely disbelieved. So she recruits two other women who are also treated as invisible, a dog walker and a vicar's wife, and starts asking questions in the mild English way that makes people say far too much. Thorogood builds puzzles first and feelings second, and there is a proper fair play solution waiting at the end.

Hazel Wong, newly arrived at an English boarding school from Hong Kong, and Daisy Wells, confident in the way rich English girls are trained to be, run a secret detective society that has so far solved nothing worth mentioning. Then Hazel finds the science mistress dead in the gym, and by the time she comes back with Daisy the body has gone. The whole thing is written as Hazel's casebook, and it is far cleverer than its reading age suggests, particularly about how a Chinese girl is handled by a school that believes it is being kind to her.

Vera Wong runs a Chinatown tea shop with almost no customers, texts her grown son every morning and gets nothing back, and comes downstairs one day to a dead man on her floor. Rather than leave the scene alone she takes the flash drive out of his hand, calls the police afterwards, and then invites the suspects in for tea, on the sound theory that a murderer returns to the scene. What follows is a mystery, but it is really about a woman collecting four broken people and force feeding them soup until they improve.

Kaveri is newly married and installed in her husband's house in 1921 Bangalore, with mathematics books she is not meant to read and a bicycle she is not meant to want. At a club dinner a man is stabbed, a woman she has only just met is blamed, and Kaveri starts asking the questions nobody else will. Nagendra is an ecologist by profession and it shows in how the city is built on the page, the lakes, the gardens, the segregated club. The mystery is decent. The reason to keep reading is Kaveri arguing her way into a life, with a husband who turns out to be an ally.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron live at Coopers Chase in Kent and meet weekly to go through old police files for entertainment. Then the developer who built the place is found dead in his kitchen, they have a live case, and they promptly adopt two real police officers to help them run it. Osman writes jokes at the rate of a professional quizmaster and the plotting plays fair. What surprised me is the thing running underneath: dementia, widowhood, the specific arithmetic of knowing how many years are left. Joyce's diary entries do most of that work quietly.

Rosie Lee, known to everybody as Aunty Lee, is a wealthy widow who cooks because she loves it, runs a shophouse restaurant, and treats everyone's business as her own. A body turns up on the beach, a guest fails to arrive at her wine tasting dinner, and she works the case the way she works a kitchen, by watching who eats what and who talks too quickly. Yu is very good on Singapore itself: the money, the domestic workers, the polite social sorting, the gap between what people say at the table and what they mean by it.

Flavia de Luce is eleven, lives in a crumbling English house in 1950, and keeps a Victorian chemistry laboratory upstairs where she plans revenge on her sisters. A dead bird appears on the doorstep with a postage stamp in its beak, her father is arrested, and Flavia sets off on her bicycle to clear him. The voice is the entire book: gleeful, snobbish, precise about poisons and completely unmoved by corpses. Underneath the comedy there is a dead mother nobody in the house will discuss, and Bradley lets that silence sit in every room.

Colonel Protheroe is found shot in the vicar's study, and since half the village had a reason to want it, the vicar narrating the story opens by admitting that whoever did it has done the parish a service. This is Miss Marple's first novel and she is nothing like the cuddly figure television later built. She is nosy, certain, and openly convinced that a village gives you a complete education in human wickedness. The plot is a clockwork thing of timings, alibis and two confessions that cannot both be true.

The McMasters Conservatory admits students who each have one person they need removed from the world, and teaches them how, with lectures, practicals and a firm rule that the target must genuinely deserve it. The book follows three students and their intended victims, framed as a textbook with a fussy dean narrating. It is a comedy about planning murders. The tone is gentle, the setting is the 1950s, the whole thing is built like a puzzle box, and there is still no getting around what everyone in it is training to do.

Susan Ryeland is an editor who sits down with the new manuscript from her publisher's most profitable crime writer, a 1950s village whodunnit called Magpie Murders. You read that novel inside this one. Then the manuscript stops before the solution, the author is dead, and Susan has to work out both what the fictional detective would have concluded and what happened to the man who invented him. Horowitz is making a point about how much writers come to hate their own creations, and about how a golden age puzzle is actually engineered, while handing you two complete mysteries.

Jane Neal is killed by an arrow in the woods near Three Pines, a village in Quebec that appears on no map, days after finally letting anyone see her paintings. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache comes down from Montreal, and what makes this series work is that he investigates by listening and by noticing what people are frightened of. The village is the comfort: the bistro, the bookshop, the bread, the fire. The crime is not comforting at all, and Penny is unsentimental about how much cruelty a small pretty place can hold.