Lois Meade Books In Order

Publication Order of Lois Meade Mystery Books

The name Lois Meade refers to a series of cozy mystery novels set in a small English town. Written by Ann purser, the books follow the exploits of a cleaning lady who also solves crimes.

+The Story

Cozy Mysteries are a dime a dozen. There are so many of them written and published every year that they could fill up an entire bookstore. However, just because there is a saturation of Cozy mystery novels doesn’t mean they are any less popular.

The best cozy mysteries do not do anything new. In fact, a cozy mystery wouldn’t be a cozy mystery if it did anything new. Most novels in the genre follow a pattern. You have a simple man or woman living in small village/town where crime is hardly rife but not unheard of.

The man or woman in question specializes in a particular field. And while that field looks mundane, they eventually show that it is possible to use those skills to solve murders.

The most popular cozy mysteries take that tried and tested formula and execute it in new and exciting ways.

The Lois Meade series started publication in 2002. And anyone who reads it will tell you that it doesn’t do anything new. But fans of Ann Purser will attest to the fact that the series checks all the boxes of a cozy mystery whilst also still keeping things fresh and exciting.

Lois Meade is introduced to readers in ‘Murder on Monday’. Nothing about Lois’ life stands out. She is a wife and mother of three children. Her husband is an electrician. He makes decent money but it is nowhere near enough to support them all.

Because theirs is a working-class family, Lois also works. She has her own cleaning business. The heroine spends her days going into people’s homes and scrubbing them from top to bottom until they are nice and shiny.

When one of Lois’s clients dies, she realizes that her job gives her the perfect excuse to go snooping about. So she does just that. While Lois initially only wants to satiate her curiosity, the more she looks, the more clues she finds, the more connections she makes, the more confident she becomes in her ability to find the murderer.

So she does just that. Of course, her journey to success is fraught with complications. At the end of the day, Lois is just a cleaning lady, so no one ever takes her seriously. Even when she presents hard evidence to back some of her claims, she is only ever met with disinterest.

The people in Lois’ community would rather leave the business of catching killers to the police. However, Lois does not let such attitudes slow her down. If anything, those sorts of sentiments only spur her on to prove that she is right.

And as it turns out, Lois is right more often than she is not.

The Lois Meade series progresses in a relatively predictable manner. Each new novel brings with it a new dead body. Lois’s cleaning business positions her to investigate the potential suspects.

Sometimes the suspects and even the friends and family of the victim in question are already her clients. Other times, Lois uses her business to create connections with the people she needs to interrogate.

In most cozy mysteries, the police are not only buffoons but they seem determined to get in the amateur sleuth’s way. Sometimes they will even threaten her with prison if she doesn’t take her hands off an official investigation.

Because of how common this trope is, readers might be surprised to find that Inspector Cowgill, the police officer with whom Lois typically contends, is actually intelligent. Cowgill has a good head on his shoulders.

He knows what he can and can’t do, and when Lois offers to help him solve a murder, he gives her the opportunity to prove her theories. More often than not, Cowgill and Lois will collaborate to solve mysteries.

The Lois Meade series has been criticized for being too slow paced. The author spends a lot of time delving into the personal lives of Lois Meade’s friends and family. This is despite the fact that those characters rarely impact the mysteries of their respective novels.

Some audiences have accused the author of padding her Lois Meade novels with unnecessary exchanges between characters that do not matter.

These same audiences have been a little more lenient whenever the author has chosen to explore Lois Meade’s own personal life. Lois is an ordinary woman who will, on occasion, contend with the problems of being a wife and mother in a working-class family.

+The Author
Ann Purser was a journalist before she took to writing fiction. She also worked as an art gallery proprietor and even ran her own gallery in an ancient barn behind the house. Ann’s work allowed her to meet a wide range of people.

The interactions she enjoyed and the relationships she formed aided her when she finally began to craft characters for her stories.

+Murder on Monday
No one expects much from Lois Meade. To some people, she’s just the cleaning lady, and Lois is fine with that. Her cleaning business exists to help her complement her husband’s income.

Lois’ family gets by, though things could be better. The death of a local spinster throws some unexpected excitement into Lois’ life. Because her job gives her access to people’s houses, she is able to immediately begin poking around and collecting clues.

Lois is sure that she can find the killer before even the police. But as she proceeds to probe and investigate, she is surprised to unearth secrets with significant consequences for her quaint little village.

If Lois isn’t careful, all that snooping could put her family in danger.

+Terror on Tuesday
Lois Meade cleans people’s houses for a living. As such, you wouldn’t expect her life to be particularly exciting. And it shouldn’t be, except that Lois is an amateur sleuth who likes to solve murders in her spare time.

Lois’ interest is piqued when a dead man is found in a suit of armor in a chapel. Then another man turns up dead tied to a tree. Lois jumps on the case, using her access as a cleaning lady to collect clues.