Alex Duggins Books in Order: How to read Stella Cameron’s series?

Murder in the Cotswolds.

Who is Alex Duggins?

Written by Stella Cameron, this mystery series started as an ebook success story before becoming a paperback one.

The series centers on Alex Duggins who, after the end of her marriage, came back to her hometown of Folly-on-Weir in the Cotswolds.

She started anew, opened a pub named The Black Dog, and stumbled onto murder mysteries, becoming an amateur sleuth in the process.

Alex Duggins Books in Order:

Every book in the Alex Duggins series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.

1. Folly – Following the breakdown of her marriage, Alex Duggins has returned to her picturesque hometown of Folly-on-Weir in the Cotswolds in order to start afresh. But you can’t outrun the past, as Alex is about to discover when she stumbles across a frosted corpse buried in the snow. The subsequent murder investigation threatens to unearth old secrets – including Alex’s own.
2. Out Comes the Evil – Once again Alex Duggins and her veterinarian friend Tony Harrison are thrown into a major murder investigation. An almost fresh body is discovered in a disused well among the ruins of a 14th-century manor house … the motive for the killing a baffling mystery. The victim was a widow who had lived quietly in the picturesque Cotswolds village of Folly-on-Weir for the past ten years. Who on earth could want her dead, and by such brutal means?
3. Melody of Murder – The idyllic Cotswold village of Folly-on-Weir is a piece of paradise found … until ‘those incomer Quillams’ arrive. A young piano virtuoso and his neglected but talented half-sister, their controlling father, the pianist’s beautiful, acquisitive and passionate mother, an ambitious family retainer, and an intimidating woman who has always run the Quillam household form a successful little empire – until it starts to crumble.

4. Lies That Bind – When a body is discovered in the neighbouring village of Underhill, Alex Duggins, owner of Folly-on-Weir’s premier pub, The Black Dog, is determined not to get involved – for once. But when she learns that the person who found the body was young Kyle Gammage, who helps out at her friend Tony’s veterinary clinic, she and Tony are reluctantly drawn into the murder investigation.
5. Whisper the Dead – A new year arrives and winter holds Britain’s Cotswold Hills in its icy grip once more. But it’s the construction of a new housing development that’s causing the residents of Folly-on-Weir most concern. As she passes the site late one afternoon, pub owner Alex Duggins is confronted by the terrifying scene of a construction trailer on fire and a man desperately trying to break the door down.
6. Trap Lane – Although he has always kept his past carefully hidden, as the ever-reliable manager of her well-stocked pub, The Black Dog, Hugh Rhys has Alex Duggins’ total trust. However the unexpected arrival of two women from his past raises the fury of the usually even-tempered Hugh, threatens his carefully-crafted reputation and sends shockwaves through the village.

7. The Playing Fields – Six weeks after a battered body is found in the grounds of the village cricket club, DCI Dan O’Reilly and his team are no further forward in the investigation. No witnesses, no leads, no clues whatsoever. Then a second body is discovered in the nearby tithe barn used by the local amateur dramatics society, artfully posed just like the first. Could there be a serial killer on the loose? When evidence leads O’Reilly to visit the Black Dog pub, owner Alex Duggins and her partner Tony are once again drawn into a police investigation.

What should you read if you like the Alex Duggins novels?

If you like reading the Alex Duggins series, you may be interested in the Thea Osborne series by Rebecca Tope, the Dorothy Martin series by Jeanne M. Dams, or the Agatha Raisin series by M.C. Beaton.

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