One very much worth reading is Richard Fletcher's Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England. He starts with one event: during the Danish conquest of England by Canute, one earl - Uhtred- resists for a while but then agrees to submit. At the formal ceremony, where Uhtred is to formally do so, the earl and his forty followers are ambushed and massacred ( with Canute's obvious permission) by one of his enemies, named Thurbrand. That massacre sets off a series of reprisals and violent reactions between the families that lasts over sixty years. Sources for this time and place are meager, so Fletcher does a lot of work to figure out the other possible details of this story. He's able to draw parallels with other incidents, and with the practices of similar societies of the time, to propose very good hypothetical narratives. Those narratives are gratifyingly free of embroidery: a very common habit in popular history is to just spin out a whole tale and paint a complete picture, with only a few "could/would have" qualifiers. Fletcher draws a clear line around what's known from his sources, and when he hypothesizes he explains how and why.

I love to recommend this book as an example of the methods of the historian-as-detective, how it's possible to do very good, informative historical research even when records are sparse.