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I’m a devourer of Golden Age Detective Fiction, and a writer of locked-room mysteries inspired by the classics. When it comes to old-school mystery writers, my favourites are John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and of course Agatha Christie. What I love about that era is the brilliance of the puzzles, and the way those writers really engaged with the reader and (in some cases) addressed them directly, challenging them to solve the crime along with the detective. Additionally, I’m fascinated by stage illusions (though I’m terrible at performing them myself), and this has also had a major influence on my writing.
If you’re interested in locked-room mysteries, cozy crime, or magic, then you need to read this book.
Gigi Pandian is one of the best in the business, and with Under Lock & Skeleton Key she launches a brand new and exciting series. Gigi is excellent at creating charming characters that the reader cannot help but care about – this makes the mysteries themselves all the more compelling – and this book captures everything that’s great about her writing.
"Wildly entertaining." —The New York Times Book Review
Known for her wonderfully addictive characters, multiple award-winning author Gigi Pandian introduces her newest heroine in this heartfelt series debut. Under Lock & Skeleton Key layers stunning architecture with mouthwatering food in an ode to classic locked-room mysteries that will leave readers enchanted.
An impossible crime. A family legacy. The intrigue of hidden rooms and secret staircases.
After a disastrous accident derails Tempest Raj’s career, and life, she heads back to her childhood home in California to comfort herself with her grandfather’s Indian home-cooked meals. Though she resists, every day brings her…
I’m a devourer of Golden Age Detective Fiction, and a writer of locked-room mysteries inspired by the classics. When it comes to old-school mystery writers, my favourites are John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and of course Agatha Christie. What I love about that era is the brilliance of the puzzles, and the way those writers really engaged with the reader and (in some cases) addressed them directly, challenging them to solve the crime along with the detective. Additionally, I’m fascinated by stage illusions (though I’m terrible at performing them myself), and this has also had a major influence on my writing.
This book captures just about everything I love about the mystery genre.
It’s a locked-room mystery set in a snowbound cabin, where a group of city slickers find themselves confronted with a seemingly supernatural entity: the Wendigo. Rim of the Pit has a tangible sense of dread, which is something you don’t often find in Golden Age mysteries, but at the same time it’s a masterclass in logic and misdirection.
It certainly taught me a lot about creating suspense but also about planting clues – lessons I’ve put to use in my own books.
The cult classic mystery that John Dickson Carr hailed as “a marvel of ingenuity.”
“I came here to make a dead man change his mind.”
So begins a creepy and unusual mystery celebrated to this day as one of the greatest “impossible crime” novels of all time. When a family’s promise to protect the beloved pine grove of their dead father creates a financial strain, a seance is suggested to summon the ghost of the late logger and ask its permission. A mixed group of skeptics and believers convene at a snow-bound lodge to call the spirit with a group…
I’m a devourer of Golden Age Detective Fiction, and a writer of locked-room mysteries inspired by the classics. When it comes to old-school mystery writers, my favourites are John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and of course Agatha Christie. What I love about that era is the brilliance of the puzzles, and the way those writers really engaged with the reader and (in some cases) addressed them directly, challenging them to solve the crime along with the detective. Additionally, I’m fascinated by stage illusions (though I’m terrible at performing them myself), and this has also had a major influence on my writing.
The main character in Death From A Top Hat is the enigmatic magician, The Great Merlini, and he is certainly a beguiling and intriguing character!
The perfect amateur sleuth, with everything I love about this particular “stock character.” He’s funny, he’s smart, and he has – quite literally – plenty of tricks up his sleeve. This book, along with the rest of the Merlini series, offers many brilliant insights into the world of professional illusion.
But most important of all, this book offers an irresistible mystery that certainly kept me guessing!
A detective steeped in the art of magic solves the mystifying murder of two occultists.
Now retired from the tour circuit on which he made his name, master magician The Great Merlini spends his days running a magic shop in New York’s Times Square and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. The cops call him when faced with crimes so impossible that they can only be comprehended by a magician’s mind. In the most recent case, two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under…
I’m a devourer of Golden Age Detective Fiction, and a writer of locked-room mysteries inspired by the classics. When it comes to old-school mystery writers, my favourites are John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and of course Agatha Christie. What I love about that era is the brilliance of the puzzles, and the way those writers really engaged with the reader and (in some cases) addressed them directly, challenging them to solve the crime along with the detective. Additionally, I’m fascinated by stage illusions (though I’m terrible at performing them myself), and this has also had a major influence on my writing.
I simply had to include one of Daniel Stashower’s brilliant mysteries, as this all-too-brief series features one of the greatest and most famous illusionists of them all: Harry Houdini.
The story is narrated by Houdini’s brother, Dash, who serves as a kind of “Watson” to Houdini’s boisterous “Holmes,” and the two find themselves embroiled in numerous mysteries peppered with old-fashioned derring-do.
What I love about this book is the meticulous research that has clearly gone into it – but Stashower wears his learning lightly; this is a brisk adventure where the pace never sags.
Harry Houdini and his brother, Dash, are called to solve the murder of a toy tycoon in this first locked room mystery starring the legendary real-life magicians
New York City, 1897: Young escapologist Harry Houdini is struggling to get the recognition he craves from the ruthless entertainment industry. But when toy tycoon Branford Wintour is found murdered in his Fifth Avenue mansion, detectives call upon Houdini to help solve this mysterious crime, ushering in a new era of Houdini’s career: amateur sleuth.
When Harry and his brother Dash reach the scene of the murder, they discover Wintour was found dead…
Most of my novels are historical, and they include ten books set on the railways of the early 20th Century featuring Jim Stringer, a railway policeman. I am romantically drawn to that period: no mobile phones, no fluorescent light or man-made fibres – and plenty of smoke and steam available for atmospheric effects. If you really did travel back in time, you would think you were hallucinating, so I take a visual approach, providing a series of images that I hope are historically accurate whilst also having the force and originality of dream scenes. It seems to me that the writers on my list take a similar approach.
Hawksmoor is a tale of murder and ghostly happenings in some London churches. It’s set partly in the modern-day (or 1985, when it was published) and partly in the early 18th Century. The 18th Century language – making full use of the randomized capitalization favoured at the time – is amazingly vivid: "Mr. Vanbrugghe…blew into my Closet like a dry leaf in a Hurricanoe." Indeed, the modern-day scenes are deliberately slightly pallid in comparison with Ackroyd’s fever dream of the past. I have read this book three times, and it remains mysterious to me – which I mean as a compliment.
'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe'
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . .…
I write fantasy novels, including A College of Magics, River Rats, and When the King Comes Home. With Patricia C. Wrede, I wrote half of the Kate and Cecy series: Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician.
Agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the spectacularly well-dressed protagonist tasked with saving the world (again) in an alternate 1912 Cairo. This award-winning novel awed me with its detail and invention. What I loved most was the way the world building relegated the British Empire to relative unimportance. Come to think of it, I loved the Ministry library almost as much.
Included in NPR’s Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade (2011-2021) A Nebula Award Winner A Ignyte Award Winner A Compton Crook Award for Best New Novel Winner A Locus First Novel Award Winner A RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner A Hugo Award Finalist A World Fantasy Award Finalist A NEIBA Book Award Finalist A Mythopoeic Award Finalist A Dragon Award Finalist A Best of 2021 Pick in SFF for Amazon A Best of 2021 Pick in SFF for Kobo
Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark goes full-length for the first time in his dazzling debut…
I like to believe that my own characters struggle with being human. They struggle with their bitterness, their relations to others (or lack thereof), and their unresolved guilt. What happens when guilt is left unresolved? What happens when someone enters into a state of self-imposed isolation? These are topics I enjoy exploring in my work. I’ve enjoyed writing since I was a child. My mother deserves all the credit. At bedtime, rather than reading bedtime stories to me from a book, she would make up a story and then ask me to do the same. This helped me to develop a lifelong love for reading and writing.
I first read the English translation of this book during my undergraduate studies. The first time I read it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. Something about it disturbed me, made me feel sick, and made me question what it means to be human.
I felt myself called to read it again years later and, just recently, I picked it up a third time. Mersault’s indifference in relation to his experiences and to society forced me to question my own views concerning the meaning of life.
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward.
Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.
“The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of…
My passion for the mystery genre began when I read Nancy Drew back in second grade. I chain read the series. I think it’s a natural impulse to want to understand mysteries and the one thing we can solve is a mystery on paper since so many things don’t lend themselves easily to explanations. The first incarnation of my writing career was as an M/M romance author and one of my romantic suspense novels, Acts of Passion, featured Dr. Michael DiSanto, a genius, quirky, and handsome profiler with a fascinating past. I grew to love that character so much that his backstory was born in The Boy on the Lawn.
I love anything Sherlock Holmes. So a YA teen detective story with the present-day descendants of Sherlock Holmes with mysterious deaths to solve? The title alone got me, then when I read the blurb, I was on it. Sherlock Holmes’ great great great granddaughter, Charlotte Holmes, already a brilliant sleuth consulting with Scotland Yard and Jamie Watson, the great great great grandson of John Watson are in America where they have ended up in the same boarding school. When a student dies under mysterious circumstances, Jamie and Charlotte’s paths cross, throwing them together, and they can only trust each other in a world where the enemy lurks very close… If I was a fish and you wanted to catch me, put this book on a hook and dangle it.
The first book in a witty, suspenseful new series about a brilliant new crime-solving duo: the teen descendants of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. This clever page-turner will appeal to fans of Maureen Johnson and Ally Carter.
Jamie Watson has always been intrigued by Charlotte Holmes; after all, their great-great-great-grandfathers are one of the most infamous pairs in history. But the Holmes family has always been odd, and Charlotte is no exception. She’s inherited Sherlock’s volatility and some of his vices—and when Jamie and Charlotte end up at the same Connecticut boarding school, Charlotte makes it clear she’s not looking…
So look, I’m going to admit something: I’ve been casting myself as the heroine in historical adventures and mysteries since the age of six. I’ve been Sherlock Holmes’s daughter, Elizabeth Bennett’s slightly disreputable sleuthing cousin, the lone lady Pinkerton hunting down Butch and Sundance. These youthful fantasies combined three things I adored: puzzles, adventure, and geeking out on history. When I got a little older, I left off imagining myself in the starring role in favour of something even more immersive: becoming someone else entirely. Whether I’m writing them or reading them, books like the ones on this list transport me, and I hope they’ll transport you, too.
Sometimes, I want to be transported to faraway, exotic places. But it can be equally delicious to experience a place you know well—in a time you don’t. It’s what attracted me to writing about 19th century New York, and what I love about Iona Whishaw’s Lane Winslow mysteries. They take place in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, a place I’ve spent plenty of time in. But sleuthing with ex-spy Lane Winslow in 1946 brings a fresh, fun perspective that is at once familiar and totally new. This book is perfect for curling up lakeside in an Adirondack chair, hot cup of tea in hand.
It is 1946, and war-weary young ex-intelligence officer Lane Winslow leaves London to look for a fresh start. When she finds herself happily settled in King's Cove, a sleepy hamlet nestled in the idyllic interior of British Columbia surrounded by a suitably eclectic cast of small-town characters she feels like she may finally be able to put her past to rest. But then a body is discovered, the victim of murder, and although she works alongside the town's inspectors Darling and Ames to discover who might possibly have motivation to kill, she casts doubt on herself. As the investigation reveals…
I was born on Halloween, so I’m officially a card-carrying member of all things creepy, right? However, I’m definitely drawn to books with mood and atmosphere over outright horror and gore. I find the subtle aspects of fear so much more interesting—how is it that one person’s reality can be so different than another’s? I write domestic suspense because I think the people we are closest to and the places we think are safest are often the ones that can hurt us the most. Where a story takes place is so very important. I need to know the geography, the feel, the history of a place—then I can put people in it and make bad things happen.
Ever been to a bad dinner party? I can bet it wasn’t as bad as the one in this book! I adored the spooky small-town insular setting in this book, and the mood contributes to the claustrophobic feel of the plot. As you read to try to figure out who did it, you realize that everyone has secrets—and no one can be trusted.
Who do you turn to, when everyone's a stranger and you stop believing what your own eyes see?
Finnie Doyle and Paddy Lamb are leaving city life in Edinburgh behind them and moving to the little town of Simmerton. Paddy has landed a partnership in a local solicitors and Finnie's snagged a job as a church deacon. Their rented cottage is quaint; their new colleagues are charming, and they can't believe their luck.
But witnessing the bloody aftermath of a brutal murder changes everything. They've each been keeping secrets about their pasts. And they both know their precious new start…
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