Crime and the City: The Azores

Nine volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic Ocean that are technically part of Portugal, though are 1,500 km west of the Portuguese mainland. The Azores consist of (among a few other islands) São Miguel (the largest island and economic hub), Santa Maria, Terceira, Graciosa, São Jorge, Pico, Faial, Flores and Corvo. It’s a mid-Atlantic world of calderas (cauldron-like volcanic depressions), natural hot springs, and world-class whale watching that is looking for the eco-tourism dollar.

The Azores are also of course the old weigh station between Europe and the Americas–all those intrepid Portuguese sea captains setting out in the Age of Exploration to colonize Brazil, West Africa and beyond headed first to the Azores for fresh water en route….

I don’t know why I’m surprised, as it’s a perfectly lovely spot, good Portuguese food and wines and a popular holiday destination, but I never really thought of the Azores as a setting for cozy crime–but apparently it’s a popular destination with cozy crime writers too….

Miriam Winthrop’s Azores Heritage Mystery Series are five cozies set across the different islands of the Azores following a trio of amateur sleuths. Book one, Death at the Water’s Edge (2015), is set on Santa Maria where Anton and Catarina have moved their family to an abandoned dairy, determined to transform it into Casa do Mar, a rural hotel. But a shocking murder threatens to destroy everything. Lori Moore has come to the Azores seeking nothing more than rest but finds herself investigating the killing.

And so Anton, Catarina, and Lori become Azores investigators. Book two, Death at the Crater’s Edge (2015) takes them to Faial hunting stolen priceless relics while book three, Death at the Forest’s Edge (2016), finds them in the secluded, remote forests of Terceira where a secluded community has preserved a way of life unchanged for generations but where now murder has intruded.

In book four (Winthrop took a bit of a break before returning to the series), Death at the Devil’s Edge (2025), they travel to a remote volcanic outcrop, São Miguel, where children have gone missing and, finally, in book five, Death at the Vineyard’s Edge (2025), the trio travel to Pico where family feuds threaten to tear up an ancient winery.

Yorkshire, England-born Victoria Tait is a cozy crime dynamo. Her multiple series (which all seem to include a lot of amateur sleuths and tea drinking) are set in Cotswold villages to Northumberland’s rugged coast to the African savannah, India and Morocco…and recently the Azores. Tait calls them “travel cozies.” Antiques and Adversity in the Azores (2025) introduces troubled antiques expert, Georgina Carey, who’s offered a commission to value the estate of a deceased Portuguese collector on São Miguel Island in the Azores.

Despite her best intentions to focus solely on the commission, Georgina finds herself drawn into the secrets of the local town as residents unexpectedly confide in her and then finds a body in the lakeside estate. This is hopefully the first Azores book in a new series for Tait.

A few more crime novels set in the Azores:

• Jaclyn Goldis’s The Last Time We Saw Her (2026): ten years ago, a group of American teenage summer campers went to a lush and isolated Azores island for a hiking and heritage trip. But when a clue to a local legend of buried treasure emerged, the summer devolved into a frenzied hunt and culminated in the disappearance—and rumored murder—of a female camper,. She was never seen again and the treasure never found. A decade later the missing girl’s friends return to find out what happened to her.
• Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 (2025) by Lisa Unger is set on a fictional Azores island, Falcao. Unger is a prolific American author of psychological thrillers. In Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 a game of hide-and-seek turns into a test of survival as a terrible storm comes rapidly in and someone is hunting the contestants.

And finally something from an earlier time and a famous writer, but not perhaps one normally associated with the Azores or whose work normally gets a shout out in CrimeReads! Robinson (1958) is a novel from the Scottish writer, poet and essayist not usually associated with genre fiction, Muriel Spark. Robinson was only Spark’s second novel—she would go on to write classics such as The Prime of Miss Jedan Brody, Memento Mori and The Girls of Slender Means among others still massively revered in the UK.

Set in 1954 the book begins with twenty-nine people on a plane bound for the Azores and then Lisbon (planes crossing the Atlantic from the USA to Portugal would frequently stop to refuel on the Azores). It crashes on a remote island killing all the crew and most of the passengers.

The book’s narrator, January Marlow, and two other survivors, are nursed by Robinson, a mysterious loner already in residence on the island. Physically they recover from the ordeal but mentally they face challenges as they wait out the long time until the boat that will collect the pomegranate crop will arrive to rescue them. rules break down, civilization threatens to collapse.

It’s all very William Goldings’s Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and remains one of Spark’s more obscure novels and didn’t get grew reviews in the U.K. in the late 50s. Yet it is now often reread as a decadent physiological thriller that also abstractly comments on Britain’s post-war imperial decline.

And that’s the Azores–once key to Portugal’s incredible Age of Discovery, vital to the trans-Atlantic trade from New York to Rio. That era passed and now the Azores is all about tea, pineapples, sugar-beet, passion fruit, tourism and, increasingly, European space launches from the international spaceport on Santa Maria Island.