5 mystery novels to pick up this summer

Even if you can’t make it abroad this summer, these five mystery novels will whisk you away to far-flung locales — Tuscany, Iceland, England, the Seine — as you puzzle out who did it and why.

Murder in Pitigliano by Camilla Trinchieri

Nico Doyle, a retired New York homicide detective, moved to Tuscany to be near his late wife’s family. But he can’t seem to escape work. In this, the fifth installment in Trinchieri’s Tuscan Mysteries series, Doyle just can’t say no when 7-year-old Cilia Bianconi begs him to clear her father of a murder charge. To absolve him, he will have to dig deep into the unsavory secrets of one of the town’s most powerful families.

Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant

Pennant introduces readers to indomitable sleuth Miss Hortense. As a young woman, she moved from Jamaica to Birmingham, England, and helped create a communal organization giving financial and crime-solving help to the city’s Jamaican community. After one of its members was killed chasing a potential murderer, Miss Hortense was summarily dismissed from the group. Now, 40 years later, it appears the same killer has returned, forcing her to heal old wounds and finally crack the case.

Death on the Island by Eliza Reid

Kavita Banerjee, deputy Canadian ambassador to Iceland, is fatally poisoned during a diplomatic dinner in Heimaey, an island off Iceland’s south coast. Banerjee’s husband, Rahul, contends that Banerjee’s boss, Canadian Ambassador Graeme Shearer, murdered her after the two had a nasty dispute. But Shearer’s wife, Jane, believes her husband is innocent and sets out to find the real killer when a storm strands the diplomatic party on the island.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman

Retired widow Muriel Blossom splurges on a Seine cruise and suddenly finds herself the focus of a shadowy ring of international art thieves. After Blossom’s stateroom is ransacked and someone attempts to mug her, she discovers that the handsome lawyer who befriended her on the flight from Baltimore to Paris had secretly hidden a stolen, priceless artifact in her luggage. When he is killed, it becomes clear the thieves will stop at nothing to retrieve the artifact.

The Red Queen by Martha Grimes

It’s a seemingly impossible murder. A patron at the Queen pub in the village of Twickenham, England, is shot in the back, and no one in the crowded space saw the killer. So Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury is called in to figure out who had a motive to kill the victim — a local businessman named Tom Treadnor — plus the audacity and expertise to commit the crime. “The Red Queen” is the first new book since 2019 in Grimes’ long-running Richard Jury series.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.