5 Best Historical Mystery Books To Read Today [March 2023]

The best historical mystery books from Next Chapter [March 2023]

The historical mystery book genre is a popular subgenre of mystery fiction that combines elements of historical fiction and detective fiction. This genre typically involves a mystery set in a historical period, often involving real-life historical figures or events. The protagonist is usually a detective or amateur sleuth who must use their skills to solve the mystery while navigating the challenges and complexities of the time period.

One of the earliest examples of the historical mystery genre is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" series, which was set in Victorian England. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the genre, with authors like Dan Brown and Philippa Gregory becoming bestsellers. Many historical mysteries also incorporate elements of other genres, such as romance or supernatural fiction, to create a unique and captivating reading experience.

Overall, the historical mystery book genre is a fascinating and engaging genre that offers readers a glimpse into the past while keeping them on the edge of their seats. Whether you're interested in ancient Rome, medieval Europe, or colonial America, there is sure to be a historical mystery book that will captivate your imagination and keep you guessing until the very end.

Here, we’ve collected five of Next Chapter’s best historical mystery books, all available from major booksellers in eBook, paperback and hardcover formats (and some in audio as well) as of March 2023.

If you enjoy one of the books on this page, please don’t forget to leave the author a review :) Don’t agree with our choices? Please leave a comment and let us know which book is your favorite in the historical mystery genre!

Books featured on this page

• The Etruscan Connection (Darren Priest Mysteries Book 2) by Dick Rosano

• The Atlantic Street Murder (Detective Watters Mysteries Book 2) by Malcolm Archibald

• Percy Crow (Heirs And Descendants Book 2) by Daniel Kemp

• Langue[dot]doc 1305 by Gillian Polack

• Memory Of A Falcon (Jake Conley Book 3) by John Broughton

The Etruscan Connection (Darren Priest Mysteries Book 2) by Dick Rosano

Book excerpt

Dawn came earlier than I had wanted it to, considering the long day before. The sun shone through the gossamer curtains covering the window facing east, a soft tone at first but one that brightened by the minute. I kept my eyelids shut, but the light continued to illuminate the room and forced my eyes awake.

Alana was still asleep, a soft murmur escaping her, lips curled slightly at the corners of her mouth. I wondered what made her so happy in slumber but preferred to think that her dreams were of me or us.

I had a habit of planning my day as I woke, and this was no exception. Eyes open, I considered what lay ahead and how best to plan it.

It was now Sunday—one day left before Alana would have to train back to Vienna and leave me to fend for myself here in Tarquinia. First, we would go to the dig, meet Tesa and Aggie, then be joined by Rafaela Indolfo as we tried to untangle the events surrounding Charlie Dielman’s untimely death. That would take up most of the morning, but I hoped to spend some time later looking for Yusuf Demir, whom everyone credited with being an expert in Etruscan history and culture, not to mention the long-lost stories of the Lydian people from Anatolia.

I wasn’t sure how or when I would find him but remembered being told that he was “just now” in Cerveteri, not a very long ride from our present position in Tarquinia. I would ask Alana if she wanted to join me but didn’t know whether that would be of interest. If she declined, I decided that I would schedule the search for Demir in the afternoon, leaving the evening for the two of us to spend together before she returned to work in the morning.

After that, I could plan to visit this Daniel Thomas Corwin in Rome. His reputation as a coin expert, not to mention his affinity for Lydian treasure, would be a treat of unexpected pleasure.

I lay still in the bed, covered only by the light cotton sheet to ward against the morning breeze drifting through the open window, but somehow, I managed to wake Alana. She didn’t move at first, just opened her eyes, but then she rolled toward me and curled up in the fold of my arm. The smile inspired by her dream remained on her lips, and I enjoyed her look of happiness and pleasure.

“What are you doing awake?” she asked.

“Just awake,” I replied but pulled her closer to me. “Did you sleep well?”

“Uh-huh,” she breathed. She buried her chin in my chest, her lightly curled fingers resting on my chest, and her hair splayed across my chin.

“We could get coffee and bread here, in the room,” I suggested.

“Yes, we could, but then we’d never get out of bed,” Alana said this with a satisfied sigh.

Taking that as a signal, I pulled the light sheet back and moved to get out of bed but was restrained by Alana.

“I didn’t say you could go yet!” she complained. Her impish smile made me realize that breakfast would have to wait.

The Atlantic Street Murder (Detective Watters Mysteries Book 2) by Malcolm Archibald

Book excerpt

It was good to get home and slide off his boots, to sit in front of a ready-made fire and have a mug of sweet tea brought to him. It was good to hear Rowena bustling around in the kitchen, clattering dishes, and singing some strange Gaelic song. Watters stretched out on the chair, wondering why he barely regretted his loss of privacy.

‘Things have changed this last day,’ he thought out loud. ‘I am no longer out in the cold battling a case I do not understand.’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Rowena’s rich voice sounded a second before she poked her head through the adjoining doors. ‘The fire can’t reply to you.’

‘I was just talking to myself,’ Watters said.

‘That’s the first sign of madness, they say,’ Rowena told him, ‘and the second sign is answering back.’

Watters smiled, ‘I will try not to answer myself then.’

Rowena dusted flour from her hands. ‘You look cheerful this evening, George. Is your case making progress?’

‘We have ups and downs,’ Watters told her, ‘with the ups in no small measure due to your help in translating the Gaelic documents.’ He turned around to smile at her. ‘I think I should get you a position as the translator in chief to Scotland Yard.’ He stretched out his hand, touched her arm. ‘Thank you, Rowena.’

She pushed into him and then pulled away. ‘Oh nonsense,’ she said. For a second, she stood still with her blonde head to one side, bright alive and nervous, with the lines of suffering already easing from around her eyes and mouth.

Rowena started at the sudden hammering. Watters sighed. ‘That will be another crisis of one sort or another,’ he said. He put out his hand as Rowena moved toward the door, ‘it’s all right, Rowena, I’ll get it. It will be some uniformed constable with critical information about a broken window, or a case of furious driving, or a child who has lost her glove or some such.’

Watters was wrong. When he opened the door, Karin staggered in with her face swollen with tears and a newspaper in her hand.

‘Sergeant Watters,’ she sobbed. ‘They must have had a copy of my picture. They sent it to the ambassador and told the newspapers,’ she brandished the paper as if it was a weapon, ‘and now the whole world knows. You must help me!’

Percy Crow (Heirs And Descendants Book 2) by Daniel Kemp

Book excerpt

It wasn’t until late in the evening that I arrived back in Harrogate Hall which was lit-up like a Christmas tree. Serena had called me twice whilst I was away. The first time to say that she was bored, and the second to tell me that her hairstylist was coming; again!

***

There was the shrill sound of playful voices as Joseph, my long-suffering, stolid butler, greeted me at the door to my ancient ancestral home.

“We have unexpected company, my Lord.” If Joseph was uneasy with anything he addressed me as he had just done. More often than not he was in absolute command over the house and then I was referred to as plain ‘sir’.

Serena bounced towards me, on the tips of her toes, as though she was a ballerina performing little pas de chat steps. She was either excited by her new hair colouring, or it had sent her stark staring mad. It wasn’t long until I found out.

“Follow me, Harry. My heavenly creative team are here waiting for you. Oh, I also invited a couple of business associates up from London as well.

Something vitally important came up suddenly. We have been busy in your absence. Don’t mind, darling, do you?”

“Don’t I get a kiss nowadays? There I was thinking that it was my body and scintillating personality that attracted you, when all the time it was my money and this spacious place that you were after.” I smiled of course, but I was slightly annoyed to find that it was open house to strangers. I needed time to think, not socialise.

“Tanta, you’ll meet him in a second, just loves your cows, H. He positively fell in love with one of them, I’m telling you tears were in his eyes in adoration!”

I doubted that anyone called Tanta was a farmer, but looked on the bright side in case I was wrong. At least there was another man amongst her normal all female cast of attendants.

“I was raised in the belief, Serena, that if one stocks cows then it’s better to milk nice ones than the ugly kind. The same applies in life, in which your friend Tanta seems to have good taste. For myself, I try not to fall in love with four-legged cows as much as I do with the correspond-ing two-legged variety, but there’s no accounting for taste.” My displeas-ure was fading but not fast enough for her.

“Have I caught you in a bad mood, H? I do so hope not, as simply everyone is over the stars here in ecstasy!”

As I quickly dismissed the thought of some drug-induced party held in my county of Yorkshire, I caught sight of Joseph who was hovering, os-tensibly to take my attaché case and coat, but I sensed his displeasure. He and I had been together for too many years not to be able to under-stand situations without the need of speech.

Langue[dot]doc 1305 by Gillian Polack

Book excerpt

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert was in the process of reshaping itself after the deaths. Boundaries between people were being redrawn, memories were being consolidated, relationships were being reaffirmed. The only thing that didn’t change was Fiz. He and his friend defiantly acted as if they were still three, still rulers of the earth on which they walked. They wanted no help. If they cried alone, they didn’t tell anyone. They played pranks and they raided gardens and they earned odd bits of money through occasional jobs of work. They were not going to accept that the world had changed.

Having had its focus shifted by the loss of the one who knew all the ways and all the traditions, the rest of the town felt differently. It was as if the main street bent now at a different angle and all the vistas were new. Many town dwellers started to wonder about the people who lived under the hill. They’d noticed the hill dwellers (Artemisia would have pointed to this as evidence that not all ancestors were zombies), but now their presence was remarked upon and discussed.

“These people,” said Berta, adamantly, “these people,” she reiterated, for what she had to say was important. “These people are not going to go away.”

“I thought they’d go away,” confessed Sibilla. “Why do they live under the hill, anyway? What do they eat?” And so discussion began. Initially, it led away from the hill folk and to someone closer: Guilhem.

“He is a problem,” Berta stated, still adamant in her opinions.

“He’s a young man who needs to do a bit of work,” Guilhem-the-smith shrugged.

“Can’t terrace, can’t grow olives, no craft skills, doesn’t work with or for the abbey,” Sibilla, as always, sided with Berta.

“What can he do, then?” asked the big smith.

“Maybe our new knight can help us? Maybe we have a good job for him and he doesn’t know it.”

“How? What job?”

“We need someone expendable to talk to the hillfolk.”

“Why expendable?” Guilhem-the-smith worried when anyone thought that any individual could be sacrificed in this way. Jesus had done that, but ordinary men should not.

“We don’t even know what they are. Human, fairy, demon, something else entirely.”

Memory Of A Falcon (Jake Conley Book 3) by John Broughton

Book excerpt

Unknown to Liffi, who’d wanted to spare Jake the worry, he knew all about the incident at the temple, having received notification from his Whitehall contact. Reassured that contingency plans were in place, he occupied himself with further research. This time he wanted to enter the mentality of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers, get into their inner self to understand how the shift to Christianity had come about. The idea posed problems, however, because the corpus of Anglo-Saxon texts surviving to the twenty-first century was slight and he wanted to side-step monastic propaganda. In an attempt to do this, the Exeter Book of Old English Verse attracted him, and he treated himself to a facsimile copy with translation. Little did he suspect what would happen as a result.

* * *

Goodmanham, East Yorkshire

Liffi’s interior decorating of the temple went on apace. To honour Freya meant lauding the goddess’s family and relatives, she decided. Having taken this decision, she created a side shrine to the Vanir deities and ordered statuettes of Freya’s father, Sundorwic, the water god, Freyr, her brother, and Eostre. She placed more minor gods behind them and stood back and admired her handiwork. But sighing, she pulled out her mobile and contacted a local artist whose name she’d noted.

“Hello. Yes, I have a commission for you, if you are interested and have the time. It’s for a fifteen-foot wide and nine-foot high mural of Vanaheim. That’s it, the home of the Vanir gods.”

She was pleasantly surprised that Chris Gurney knew what she was talking about, which made the arrangement much simpler. He agreed to come to the temple in the early afternoon to cast an eye over the shrine and the material surface he’d have to paint on.

The expert gaze of the artist roved over the wooden wall and the altar whose backdrop he would create. A decisive personality, Chris Gurney, his long blond hair tied into a topknot and spade-shaped beard making him look in place in a Saxon temple, concluded in a flash.

“I’ll prime the surface from here to here,” he paced, indicating the extremities, “then prepare a sketch with charcoal to see if you like the design. An eggshell finish would be best, in my opinion.”

Liffi settled for leaving it to the expert.

“The Vanir Tribe were gods of nature,” he said, “so I’m thinking a scenic backdrop for their Hall, with gorges, crags, waterfalls, deer and falcons, and the occasional wildcat. What do you think?”

“I can see you know your deities, Chris. Are you Heathen?”

“Not really. I happen to be interested in mythology, but not just Nordic, also Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman. And lately I’ve been looking into Latin American myths, too. You know, there’s something strange about it all. There are too many similarities and I’m beginning to wonder whether the stories are legends or historical truth. I mean, Ms Wyther, has it occurred to you that these characters weren’t humans, but aliens?”

Liffi hesitated. She didn’t want to enter a long cranky discussion about aliens. Neither did she wish to offend her new acquaintance.

“It’s a lengthy and difficult subject, but I know where you’re coming from,” she said. “Let’s talk time and money, instead.”

There you go: the five best historical mystery books from Next Chapter in 03/2023. We hope you enjoy the books on this page - and if you do, please leave a comment below, or a review in Goodreads or your favorite store. We’d really appreciate it!