The latest in a truly remarkable series of indescribable books: outwardly crime stories, Penny’s books have a living pulse, and one of the most charming assemblages of complex, engaging characters I’ve ever encountered. Not all warm fuzzies, by any means—but all so deeply human that you feel the conflict in the heart of even the most apparently wicked.

At first enjoying a peaceful retirement, former Quebec homicide detective Armand Gamache reluctantly agrees to help a neighbor search for her missing estranged husband and teams up with two former colleagues on a search that reveals the workings of a psychologically damaged mind.

I have a thing for long series with complex characters, moral ambiguity and evocative writing, and Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series is one of the very best; Merrily is an Anglican vicar, a widow with an obnoxious teenaged daughter—and is also the official Exorcist for the Diocese of Hereford.

When a man's body is discovered in the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be "unnatural" in every sense. Merrily Watkins, parish priest, single mother, and exorcist, is drafted in to investigate, in this 12th installment A man's body is found below a waterfall. It looks like suicide or an accidental drowninguntil DI Frannie Bliss enters the dead man's home. What he finds there sends him to Merrily Watkins, the Diocese of Hereford's official advisor on the paranormal. It's been nearly 40 years since Hay was declared an independent state by its self-styled kinga development seen at the time as a joke, a publicity scam. But behind this pastiche a dark design was taking shape, creating a hidden history of murder and ritual-magic, the relics of which are only now becoming horribly visible. It's a situation that will take Merrily Watkinsalone for the first time in yearsto the edge of madness.

One of a kind: A book that exists on multiple levels, inviting you into death and mystery, into the heart of a family, and into the tantalizing, aromatic swirl of another culture. Beautiful, lyrical, and genuinely haunting

In a novel set in Bombay in the 1960s, teenager Pinky Mittal, who is being raised by her grandmother, opens a door that has been bolted all her life and frees the ghost of a stillborn infant that totally disrupts the household.