Books like Exit the milkman by Charlotte MacLeod

A charming and clever women detective, Precious Ramotswe, solves mysteries in Botswana's small town of Midsomin, South Africa, from 1986 to 1997, facing dangers and love in the process. The novel is beloved by readers worldwide for its clever dialogue and characters who are as flawed as the rest of us. The book is a bestseller and has been translated into 45 languages, including Polish, German, and Japanese, among others. It was also voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.

Colonel and Mrs Bantry find a dead young woman in their library, and her body may be linked to another murder. With their own detective skills stalled, they turn to Miss Marple to unravel the mystery.

The Prince of Milk follows a time‑traveling journey from prehistory through the 21st‑century English countryside to distant futures, weaving galaxies, gods, and ordinary village life into an unconventional sci‑fi romp.

Officer Peter Shandy must uncover a murder mystery in his college after a festive display of Christmas decor leads to a fatal accident.

In an unnamed city, a young woman’s quiet life is upended when a paramilitary figure known as 'the Milkman' begins to chase her, turning her ordinary days into a tense struggle for safety and privacy.

Professor Peter Shandy, New England’s famed horticulturist, investigates a murder in Pickwance, Maine, while unraveling the mystery of impossible lupines grown on an ancient farm.

The eighth Professor Peter Shandy mystery follows a deadly owl‑count at Balaclava Agricultural College, where the chase for a rare Snowy Owl leads to murder, kidnapping, and a scramble among faculty.

Fiction, Ghost story, Setting - England

In the seventh entry of the Professor Peter Shandy mystery series, a gang of thieves target antique vanes while Peter and his wife Helen investigate the crime in a small Massachusetts town.

Former detective turned professor Homer Kelly is drawn into a high‑stakes battle to protect the priceless art of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where hidden wills and treacherous trustees threaten the collection’s survival.

Fourth entry in Professor Peter Shandy’s mystery series, where Mrs. Martha Lomax and her cat Edmund unravel a death at Balaclava Agricultural College amid a county power struggle between town and university.

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950--and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story--of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school's tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder--but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse....An enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions--and a rich literary delight.From the Hardcover edition.

Annie Swann, an aspiring children's book illustrator in Cambridge, Massachusetts, finally has the canvas for her dream painting—only to find a mysterious face appearing on the wall, followed by a tragic death and a legal showdown with her uncle, famed sleuth Homer Kelly.