Mostly Murders

Many thanks to Penguin Random House Christian Publishing and WaterBrook for this ARC via Netgalley.

The Inklings were a group of writers, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who met on an informal basis to discuss and read their literary works. In The Inklings Detective Agency, the author asks what might have happened if the Inklings had been secretly recruited and tasked with putting their skills and knowledge to use as amateur sleuths on a mysterious murder case.

What follows is a fun mystery filled with historical characters, literary references and cameos from famous mystery writers, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers from The Detection Club and Arthur Conan Doyle. A playful, speculative fiction mystery, The Inklings Detective Agency does require some suspension of disbelief from its reader. It mixes actual historical facts with fiction, and takes real historical characters and places them in situations they never encountered in real life.

This novel is not a work of biographical fiction. If you want a full account of these writers’ lives and works, there are other, nonfiction books out there for you, that will give you that. But if you like the idea of taking iconic writers and placing them in a historical setting with a murder mystery to solve, this one is for you. It is atmospheric, cozy, and lovingly portrays a series of literary greats who no doubt could have solved many a real-life mystery if they had ended up as detectives rather than writers.

The planned release date for The Inklings Detective Agency is today, May 5th, 2026.

Cozy mystery – Historical fiction