Mystery Books

Find A New Mystery Book

Reading a mystery book is relaxing way to spend a quiet afternoon. After all there’s no guilty pleasure quite so fine as reading about the carnage and mayhem inflicted upon innocent – or not so innocent – victims in crime mystery books. The best place to find a new mystery book may be in the Mystery Book section of your favorite library or bookstore where the shelves abound with police procedurals, detective novels and whodunits.


There are four basic genres in mystery fiction books:

Hard-boiled Fiction

The private-eye hero is the tough guy (or tough gal) who takes his lumps for a client who at least fleetingly pulls at his heartstrings. That doesn’t mean the same client won’t end up behind bars if she plays fast and loose with the stuff that dreams are made of. Hard-boiled fiction is a uniquely American take on the whodunit formula, born in the pages of pulp magazines. Best known hard-boiled detectives? Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Modern hard cases include Robert Parker’s Spenser and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski. (2009 Books include Parker’s The Professional and Paretsky’s Hardball.)

Cozy Mysteries

Murder is never quite so genteel as it is when the crime scene is an English country house, an elegant passenger train or in the hunt country of Virginia. Solving the crime depends both on the detective’s keen powers of observation and his ear for gossip. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers are the leading luminaries of this genre. Contemporary proponents include Rita Mae Brown and Alexander McCall Smith. (2009 Books include Brown’s Hounded To Death and Smith’s Tea Time for the Traditionally Built.)

Police Procedurals

Who doesn’t love a man in a uniform? Or even plain clothes? Whether it’s the Navajo tribal police in Tony Hillerman’s Arizona, a precinct in Ed McBain’s New York or a cop shop in Ian Rankin’s Edinborough, in a police procedural the heroes always stand for law and order.

Crossover Mysteries

Mysteries with historical or paranormal elements are also prominent on the bestsellers lists. Josephine Tey’s “Daughter of Time” was born of her determination to clear Richard III of the infamous murders of the Princes in the Tower. More recent crossover masters include Caleb Carr who dare to imagine Theodore Roosevelt as a crime buster and Anne Perry whose William Monk is an amnesiac detective in Victorian England (2009 Books include Perry’s Execution Dock, 2009)