Izzy Palmer works as an assistant data analyst’s assistant at Porter & Porter in East Croydon, England. She is tall, standing six foot three, and has spent years reading every Agatha Christie mystery she can find. When her universally disliked boss Bob Thomas turns up stabbed to death in his office, Izzy becomes convinced that her deep knowledge of classic whodunits makes her the right person to catch the killer. She is wrong about many things along the way, but she gets there in the end.
That first case in A Corpse Called Bob sets the pattern for the whole series. Izzy has a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, stumbling across bodies in freezers, caravans, country houses, beaches, locked rooms, and at birthday parties. Her best friend Ramesh, a coworker at Porter & Porter, gets pulled into the investigations alongside her. The books are cozy mysteries with a comic streak, and much of the humor comes from Izzy’s willingness to charge into dangerous situations armed with nothing but enthusiasm and a head full of Agatha Christie plots.
Across fifteen books published between 2019 and 2024, Izzy grows from an office worker playing detective into someone with real investigative instincts. The series takes her all over England, from London to quaint villages to seaside towns, with each book dropping a fresh corpse into a new setting. Benedict Brown writes her as earnest and slightly chaotic, a character who is easy to root for even when her plans go sideways.
Reading Order
See the complete Izzy Palmer reading order for all books in the series.