📖 Reading list
Novels and mysteries that unfold among the island’s cliffs, quintas and levadas — from gothic Funchal to Jazz-Age intrigue.
Set in Madeira after WWI, a disillusioned ex-soldier tries to rescue his family’s failing wine business as the island fills with real figures of the era — an exiled emperor, Agatha Christie at Reid’s Hotel, George Bernard Shaw learning to tango — and a murder draws him in.
A love story spanning six centuries, opening in 1429 on a Madeira consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years, as a peasant girl and a Jewish boy off a Portuguese ship meet — their thwarted love recurring across generations.
Robert Goddard’s bestselling debut. At a lush villa on Madeira, a disgraced historian is hired to investigate the mysterious 1910 downfall of a former British cabinet minister — a quest that uncovers secrets and deaths still haunting a family.
In the 1930s, told she is dying, Nancy Leigh Cameron leaves New York for the exclusive Sanfords hotel on flower-filled Madeira — not knowing that the man she comes to love is her father’s bitterest enemy.
Botanist-sleuth Celia Grant flies to Madeira to settle her dead niece’s estate, and small anomalies draw her into a web of suspicious characters, missing children, stolen orchids and blackmail.
Wealthy, disabled Roberta Ellison settles on Madeira; when she is suddenly widowed, her half-sister arrives to help but brings problems that escalate into violence and murder. A classic British mystery reissued by The Murder Room.
A gothic sequel to The Meaning of Night, in which orphan Esperanza Gorst goes undercover as a lady’s maid — and her own origins trace back to Funchal, Madeira, where part of the narrative is set.