Books like The Penguin Who Knew Too Much by Donna Andrews

In an elite New England college, a charismatic classics professor lures a group of eccentric students into obsessive study, leading them from intellectual curiosity to corruption, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

Hard‑boiled detective Sam Spade races to recover a priceless, gem‑encrusted statuette while double‑crosses and danger creep from every corner.

Stephanie Plum, a disenchanted former lingerie buyer from Trenton, New Jersey, takes a job at her cousin Vinnie's bail‑bonding firm, steering her into the perilous world of bail jumping, undercover cop Joe Morelli and a murder mystery.

A pioneering English detective story in which a priceless diamond, once stolen from a Hindu idol and presented to a young woman on her eighteenth birthday, disappears again, sparking intrigue and danger.

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.

Four retirees in a quiet village form the Thursday Murder Club, solving crimes in their Jigsaw Room. When a developer is found dead, their keen sleuthing leads them into their first live investigation.

When the first snow falls in Oslo, a missing‑mothers investigation leads Inspector Harry Hole into a deadly serial‑killer game that threatens to unhinge him.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec investigates a surprising death in the quiet village of Three Pines, uncovering a sinister truth beneath the seeming hunting accident.

After a career crash, investigative reporter Jack Tagger becomes an obituary writer in South Florida, yet his ambition drives him to solve the mysterious death of rock star Jimmy Stoma while battling jealous editors, a widow, and a ruthless editor-in-chief.

Meg Langslow learns unsettling family truths when her estranged grandfather seeks her, prompting a hunt for her missing grandmother and a murder investigation that turns a small British town into a maze of suspects.

During a Caerphilly Christmas decorating contest, designer Meg Langslow’s mother becomes the prime suspect after a sabotage‑related murder, and Meg must solve the crime before her girlfriend is unjustly arrested.

Penguins with People Problems is a humorous collection of quirky, lovable penguin characters who mirror the awkwardness and everyday challenges of human social life.

Mickey Haller, a cynical Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, tackles a high‑paying case that turns out to be far more dangerous than it first appears.

Fiction, Ghost story, Setting - England

In New Eden, Montana, ex‑court reporter Marilee Jennings investigates her best friend’s mysterious death and discovers a web of secrets that threaten her own life.

A gripping psychological suspense novel set in Dublin, focusing on two detectives investigating a series of murders in the woods.

Meg and Michael host a bustling garage sale that turns into a murder mystery as a buyer unlocks a chest to find a body, sparking a frantic investigation among the crowded relatives and friends.

When her parents turn their home into an animal rescue, amateur sleuth Meg Langslow finds herself amid a murder mystery involving a volunteer caregiver.

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.

When a boy discovers skeletal remains in a Texas cave, veteran herbalist China Bayles must unravel two linked murders while opening a new community theater, uncovering secrets that tie the past to a present‑day killer.

When Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz’s business is booming, a cocktail‑party disaster sparks a murder mystery that forces her to use her culinary instincts to catch a killer before another bite dies.

A town clerk's investigation of a murder that could clear a political scandal.