Crime Fiction Perfect For The History Buff

Matthew Bartholomew is a physician at Cambridge during the Middle Ages, and he's keenly aware of a strange plague that is sweeping across Europe. But the death he's most concerned about is one much closer to home: the Master of Michaelhouse college has just died, and the university had forbidden him from investigating it. But Matt will put his unorthodox methods to use to get to the bottom of the mystery in this first book of a long-running mystery series.

Based on a screenplay written by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, this novel takes readers to New York City at the height of the Great Depression, when people are desperate and the city's crime families have prospered...but change is coming, especially with the end of the lucrative Prohibition era. Vito Corleone keeps his real business a secret from his four children, but when his 17-year-old son finds out what his father really does, he doesn't listen when his father urges him to pursue lawful business, and his attempts to get into his father's line of work will have deadly consequences.

In 1906, Trieste, Italy is a port city of vital importance to multiple nations, which makes the political climate very restless. When the British consulate goes missing, Special Branch Seymour is assigned to the mystery. Seymour is originally from London's East End, and he has a special linguistic gift that allows him to notice tiny nuances in speech and accents, which is a very useful ability to have when investigating a potential crime in a melting pot of a city on the brink of major political upheaval.

DS Wesley Peterson is a Black detective who has just been transferred to a small town in the West Country where two crimes—the discovery of a woman's body and the disappearance of a child—have rocked the community, giving him more than enough work to stay busy. Then, two bodies are discovered in the cellar of an old home, presenting another 400-year-old mystery that is slowly revealed in journal entries, and Peterson begins to suspect that the crimes of the past and present are linked in a shocking way.

In this story set in 1920, Albert Lincoln is a Scotland Yard detective who is called back to a town in northwest England, where he once investigated the murder of a child before the war. He was never able to solve that mystery, but now a woman has been murdered and a child gone missing, and there is only one unreliable witness to the crimes, a young boy. As Albert investigates, unwilling to let a second case go unsolved in this time, he begins to suspect his witness is in grave danger.

Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara is happy when the citizens of Florence can breathe a sigh of relief after the famed serial killer that plagued them for so many years is finally caught...but the peace won't last long. A senator is murdered, and Ferrara is not only facing a diabolical killer, but bureaucratic red tape and political infighting that impede the progress of the case. With time running out, Ferrara will be stretched to the limits to solve this case.