5 Essential Mystery Books for Beginners

Whether you’re 10 pages or 100 pages in, the feeling’s the same: There’s a mystery that needs solving. You’ve slid the widow from the suspect column into the witness column. You’ve moved the brother-in-law to the top of the suspect column, even though he hasn’t even been on the board yet. The housekeeper casually says something that has you flipping back some pages to see why it sticks out so much. Now you’ve got a new theory, and it’s a good one, too. But then the brother-in-law lays out an airtight alibi, the widow has disappeared, and the housekeeper’s story just changed. Well, there goes your evening, because you have to know what happens next.

That’s the hold of a good mystery book. It seems the further we get, the more there is to explain. We discover liars in our midst but don’t know why they’re lying. A clue pops up, only for us to realize we have no clue what exactly it means. And just when the whole thing starts making sense, the author unveils some new piece of information that sends us straight back to the beginning. Unlike most novels, where we’re anxious to see what happens next, mysteries have us obsessing over what happened before we even opened the book. It’s the anticipation that makes them so hard to put down — that feeling the next chapter might finally tell us everything.

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902)

Image via George Newnes Ltd

It’s one thing to have a mystery on your hands. Arthur Conan Doyle gives us about a dozen to worry over in The Hound of the Baskervilles. It starts with the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, whose body is discovered on the Devon moors, not far from the footprints of an enormous hound. There’s also an old family curse involving just such a creature. Sherlock Holmes has his doubts about the supernatural explanation. But then Sir Charles’ heir receives an anonymous warning, a stranger follows him through London, and one of his boots disappears from his hotel room. The more evidence that turns up, the less sense any of it seems to make.

That’s where Doyle gets us. Every time we think we’ve found a promising lead, something else happens that doesn’t quite fit. Holmes sends Watson to the Baskerville estate to do some digging. And there’s plenty to keep him busy. An escaped convict is roaming the moors, the servants are acting strangely, and practically everyone seems to be keeping something to themselves. But the more Watson uncovers, the less sense it all makes. Plus, with Holmes back in London, we’re left trying to work things out alongside him. Doyle may have hooked us with the legend of a murderous hound, but it’s the steady stream of questions he refuses to answer that keeps us turning the pages.

‘And Then There Were None’ (1939)

Image via William Morrow

You’d think that the fewer suspects there are, the easier a murder would be to solve. Agatha Christie makes a mockery of that logic in And Then There Were None. Ten strangers are invited to an island, only for each of them to be accused by their mysterious host of being responsible for someone’s death. Then one of the guests dies. And then another. With no way off the island, and nobody else around, the murderer has to be one of them. But at least the list of suspects is getting shorter.

Except Christie somehow makes the mystery harder to solve with every death. The killings appear to follow an old nursery rhyme, and the little figurines on the dining room table disappear along with the guests. We know there’s a pattern, and we can even anticipate another death. But every time we settle on a suspect, something happens to throw our theory into question. An alibi checks out or someone makes a startling accusation. And then another body turns up. Each and every time we think we’ve finally figured out where Christie is going, she veers off on a detour, and we’re once again left following behind.

‘Still Life’ (2005)

Image via St. Martin’s Minotaur

Some mysteries have us waiting for the next murder. Louise Penny manages to have us waiting for the next conversation in Still Life. Jane Neal, a retired schoolteacher, has been found dead in the woods near Three Pines, Quebec, with an arrow through her heart. The locals are convinced it was a hunting accident, but Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has his doubts. So he starts talking to Jane’s friends and neighbors, hoping to learn a little more about the woman. And wouldn’t you know it, everyone seems to have a different story to tell.

Penny is in no rush to let us hear all of them. We learn that Jane had recently submitted a painting to a local exhibition. That she’d rarely allowed visitors beyond her kitchen. There were parts of her life even her closest friends knew little about. None of these revelations seems particularly damning on its own. But each gives us another reason to wonder what else Jane might have been keeping to herself. And so we hang on to every conversation Gamache has, hoping someone will finally let something slip that explains her death. Penny makes us so invested in the gossip of this little village that a chat over coffee becomes something to look forward to — especially when there’s still so much we haven’t been told.

‘The Maid’ (2022)

Image via Ballantine Books

You can learn an awful lot about people by snooping around their hotel rooms. Not that the guests would appreciate it. But Nita Prose gives us someone with a good reason to be poking around in The Maid. Molly Gray works as a housekeeper at the Regency Grand Hotel, and she takes her job seriously. She knows which guests leave their rooms in a state, which ones have peculiar habits, and exactly how everything should look when she’s finished cleaning. But one morning, she walks into a suite and finds a wealthy guest, Charles Black, dead in his bed. Not exactly the sort of mess she’s used to cleaning up.

That’s only the beginning of Molly’s troubles. She has difficulty reading people and tends to believe what they tell her, which makes it awfully easy for others to take advantage of her. To complicate things further, the police think she might be responsible for the murder. But there’s plenty happening at the hotel that neither Molly nor the police fully understand. We learn a little about the dead man’s private life, a little about the people who worked for him, and a little about what Molly has witnessed during her shifts. The more we find out about what goes on behind the doors of the Regency Grand, the more we wonder what else its guests have been getting away with.

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1990)

Image via Atria Books

Finding a missing woman sounds like a simple enough job. Ask around, track her down, collect your money. Walter Mosley has other plans for his amateur detective in Devil in a Blue Dress. Easy Rawlins, a Black war veteran living in 1948 Los Angeles, has just lost his factory job. The mortgage isn’t going to pay itself, so when a white stranger offers him money to find a woman named Daphne Monet, Easy figures it’s worth a shot. But Easy has never worked as a detective. He does, however, know the neighborhoods where Daphne has been spotted. So he assumes a few questions will lead to easy money.

Except every answer Easy gets seems to land him in even more trouble. One acquaintance points him toward another; a promising lead turns into a dead end. Soon he’s dealing with gangsters, crooked cops, and people who aren’t exactly keen on answering his questions. Mosley keeps us just as much in the dark as Easy. We know what he knows, which isn’t nearly enough to make sense of the mess he’s landed in. We started out wanting to know where Daphne went. But as the pages fly by, we become desperate to understand why so many people want to find her, what they’re keeping from Easy, and whether he’ll survive long enough to get his answers.