Wash ,'Ariel'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Java - she may, but I'm not familiar with it. Using that site, here is the list of her mystery series featuring Thomas Lynley (aristocrat turned detective) and Barbara Havers (working class sergeant). I love the fact that Havers isn't the typical mystery-series woman protagonist especially.
I think the series hits its stride around the third or fourth book, but I enjoyed all of them.
I think that the garden gnome thing is one of the Elizabeth MacPherson (if that's the way she spells it) mysteries, written by Susan McCrumb.
Sharyn McCrumb did the postcard-sending garden gnome thing, don't know whether Elizabeth George did it too.
ETA: ha, sumi beat me to it by seven seconds
Sharyn! How could I forget that name!
One of the Sharyn McCrumb Elizabeth MacPherson books has a postcard-sending gnome. Elizabeth George is a good deal darker.
Of course it's a xpost.
Sharyn McCrumb stole my name!
Sharyn McCrumb stole my name!
Snacky McCrumb? That bitch!
Yup, McCrumb.
I love Archie Goodwin with body and soul. We're currently TiVoing all the Timothy Hutton Nero Wolfes.
Somehow or other, I've managed to never really get into the American modern mystery. It's weird; I love my old ones, my Stouts and my Chandlers and my Hammets. I prefer the UK ones most of the time, but those three, I love.
But somehow, I've never been able to enjoy Paretsky et al the way I do, say, Catherine Aird or P.D. James.
I recently picked up Deborah Crombie's mysteries featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. She's another American author writing British mystery, and Duncan is an Inspector, so it's procedural. At first she seemed a little bit like Elizabeth George Lite to me, but as the series has progressed, she's really hit her stride. Dreaming of the Bones (the fifth book) was just gorgeous, about a very Sylvia Plath-like poet, dead for five years, and the woman writing her biography, who happens to be Duncan's ex-wife.
She follows Gemma and Duncan's lives as much as presenting the mystery, too, and I'm just loving them. I've read all of the Elizabeth George Lynley mysteries, and I adored them up until the last two. In trying to tell the story from other points of view, she's getting too far away from Tommy and Barbara. And Deb is a bit whiny for my taste.
I must mention Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan series. She also has a couple of stand alones. Based in Baltimore.
And Lehane's Angie Gennaro is probably my favorite female in mysteries so far (I am admittedly not that well-read in mysteries).