Agatha Christie built the template. The closed setting, the cast of suspects, the slow revelation of motive, the satisfying click of everything falling into place at the end. If you grew up reading Christie — or came to her later and worked through the Poirot and Marple novels in a sitting — you understand what good crime fiction does at its best.
But sometimes you want something harder-edged. A world where the violence has weight. Where the protagonist doesn’t solve the puzzle from the safety of an armchair.
That’s where Frankie Armstrong comes in.
What Christie Got Right
The Christie formula works because it respects the reader. The clues are there. The characters are distinct. The setting is carefully drawn. And beneath the civilised surface — the country house, the village, the ocean liner — there is always something rotten. Someone wanted someone dead badly enough to do something about it.
That moral engine — the idea that ordinary life conceals extraordinary darkness — is what all great crime fiction shares. Christie located it in the drawing room. The Frankie Armstrong series locates it in the sun-drenched wealth of Southwest Florida, where the manicured lawns and waterfront properties hide the same human rot Christie was always writing about.
The Same Instinct, A Harder World
Frankie Armstrong isn’t Poirot or Miss Marple. She doesn’t solve crimes by sitting in a chair and applying her little grey cells while others bring her tea. She’s a British ex-soldier, physically capable, trained in actual threat assessment, and she gets her hands dirty.
But the investigative instinct is the same: look carefully, trust no one’s version of events, follow the money and the motive, and refuse to accept the comfortable explanation when something doesn’t quite fit.
Christie readers will recognise that quality in Frankie immediately. The difference is the world she operates in — one that hits back.
Why Older Readers Often Enjoy This Transition
There is a particular pleasure that comes from reading a thriller that trusts your intelligence. Christie readers know that pleasure well — she never condescended to her audience. The Frankie Armstrong series is written in that same spirit: the plots are layered, the characters have genuine depth, and the setting is rendered with real care.
If you’ve been reading crime fiction for decades, you’ve earned something that doesn’t insult your experience. You Owe Me delivers that — with sharper edges than Christie, but the same fundamental respect for the reader.
[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]
— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.
POST 6: What Richard Osman Gets Right — And What He Leaves Out
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Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has been one of the publishing phenomena of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why. Smart, warm, wickedly funny, with a cast of older protagonists who are more capable than anyone around them expects. Osman proved something the publishing industry had been slow to accept: older readers don’t want to be patronised, and they don’t want protagonists who are past it.
If the Thursday Murder Club is on your shelf, there’s a good chance the Frankie Armstrong series belongs there too — though it will give you something rather different.
The Osman Appeal
What makes the Thursday Murder Club work isn’t really the mysteries — it’s the characters. Four older people who refuse to be written off, who have accumulated enough experience to see through nonsense, and who apply decades of hard-won expertise to problems that baffle everyone around them. The setting is cosy, the tone is gentle, but the intelligence underneath is sharp.
That combination — experience, wit, and refusal to be underestimated — is enormously appealing. It reflects something true about how sharp minds work at any age.
If You Want the Edges Left In
Frankie Armstrong shares some of that DNA. She is also an outsider who sees more clearly than those around her. She also has the experience that comes from a life actually lived, not a comfortable existence that kept the world at arm’s length.
But where Osman keeps the darkness at a careful distance — cosy is a genre with rules — the Frankie Armstrong series lets it in. The crimes have real stakes. The violence is not politely offstage. Southwest Florida is a beautiful and genuinely dangerous place, and the series treats it as such.
If you’ve finished the Thursday Murder Club books and wanted something with the same intelligence but a harder edge, You Owe Me is the natural next step.
A Protagonist Who Earned Her Skills the Hard Way
Osman’s characters are marvellous, but their expertise is largely professional and intellectual — a spy, a nurse, a union leader, a psychiatrist. Frankie Armstrong’s expertise was earned in warzones. That changes the texture of the tension considerably.
The Frankie Armstrong series is for readers who want the intelligence of the best modern crime fiction, the warmth of a protagonist with real humanity, and a world that doesn’t pretend the rough edges don’t exist.
[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]
— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.
POST 7: Why the Best Crime Fiction Is Always About Place
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Ask any serious reader of crime fiction to name their favourite novels and they will almost always describe a place as much as a plot. The Louisiana bayous of James Lee Burke. The Oxford colleges of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels. The English villages of Agatha Christie. The Edinburgh streets of Ian Rankin.
Place in crime fiction is never background. It is character. And the best crime writers understand that the world their stories inhabit must be rendered so precisely that the reader can smell it.
What Makes Southwest Florida Extraordinary
Southwest Florida — Naples, the Gulf Coast, the edge of the Everglades — is one of the least-written settings in American crime fiction. Which is strange, because it has everything a crime novelist could want.
It is one of the wealthiest regions in the United States per capita, which means old money and new money sitting side by side, and all the resentment and concealment that creates. It has a service economy that keeps the whole expensive machine running, populated by people who see the wealthy up close every day. It has genuine wilderness pressing in from every direction — the Everglades to the east, the Gulf to the west. And it has a seasonal rhythm that transforms it entirely: hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving between November and April, then the region contracting back to the people who actually call it home.
That rhythm — who is here, who is hiding, who is passing through — is natural story structure.
Place as the Source of Crime
The best crime fiction doesn’t just use its setting as backdrop. It shows how the setting produces the crime. Christie’s closed-society England produced a particular kind of murderer: someone with something to protect, operating within social constraints that made direct violence a last resort. Rankin’s Edinburgh produces a different kind: institutional corruption, class resentment, the weight of history.
Southwest Florida produces its own kind. Wealth that needs to be kept clean. Power that prefers to stay invisible. A beautiful surface that rewards those who don’t look too hard underneath.
Frankie Armstrong looks hard. She can’t help it.
The British Outsider’s Eye
Part of what makes Southwest Florida come alive in the Frankie Armstrong series is the perspective. Frankie is British, ex-military, an outsider in this particular corner of America. She notices what the locals have stopped noticing. She doesn’t take the unspoken rules for granted. And she is drawn, with the instinct of a trained soldier, to precisely the things that don’t quite fit.
You Owe Me is crime fiction with a sense of place as strong as anything in the tradition. If you read for the world as much as for the puzzle, this is for you.
[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]
— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.