"I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings. I can’t imagine the kind of pain you must have been suffering. Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you committed. I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you." Strange Pictures by horror Youtuber Uketsu is a multimedia psychological horror/mystery novel told (partially) in the form of pencil drawings, where the reader, as detective, has to figure out the hidden meanings in each image. Overall, I felt like I would have liked to see more drawings, not just because the multimedia gimmick was the best part but because then, I would've spent less time having to read it. The book's prologue is an academic lecture about children's psychological drawings, in which the lecturer discusses how a person's subconscious character can be inferred from their art. Armed with this knowledge, we are then tossed into three short stories which all revolve around the mysterious significance of ...

That's the thing about old friends. You just know these things about them. You have learned to love them. This is the glue that binds us together. The Hunting Party is Lucy Foley's first book, so I'm reading it in reverse order relative to The Midnight Feast from a couple weeks ago. And... I really did not like this one. That surprised me, considering that the elements I didn't like about it were all—okay, maybe they weren't my favourite parts of Midnight Feast either, but I thought they came off better there than they did here. Maybe it's because there was more bonkers supernatural drama in The Midnight Feast. Or maybe The Hunting Party's cast of insufferable rich people are just that much more punchable. The Hunting Party follows a group of old uni friends, now in their thirties with high-powered jobs, and who don't seem to have much in common anymore except their annual New Year's party. This crew could have been guests at the luxury retre...

"Keeping people away from the land—from their land—like this, it's evil. It's a kind of murder." The distinction between a murder mystery and a psychological thriller is a matter of some debate —certainly there are many psychological thrillers featuring a murder, and many tense mystery novels rooted in the psyche. But I'd like to propose a metric that I'll call the Copacabana Rule, after the melodramatic climax of the Barry Manilow song : "There was blood and a single gun shot— But just who shot who?" That is to say that if, rather than elements like motive, means, or murder weapons, the central mystery is suspense over which character is going to get axed (or indeed, if there was any murder at all), then you are firmly in psychological thriller territory. The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley passes the Copacabana test. There are four-ish corpses, and in my eBook, which displayed as having 492 pages, the first victim is identified on page 368, 75%...

"No point living if you've nowt to die for." The first book in D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series, Anthrax Island , was a surprise COVID-era gem. It got several rave reviews from the mystery blogosphere, and personally I found both the setting and the clever locked room mystery to be highly original. The version I read had this rather dour cover , so I was pleasantly surprised on picking up Marshall's second book Black Run to see these new editions pictured to the left. They really nail the tone of the series, that tone being "cheese popcorn". If you're not familiar with unconventional detective John Tyler, let me paint a picture: he's a grizzled super-spy from Yorkshire whose body is decorated with scars and "tattoos from everywhere he's done jobs". Some days he's stabbing a man in the throat with a screwdriver, and other days he's sat in a cafe with a Maigret novel drinking hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. He d...

  Recently my wife and I were discussing the best and worst video games we played in 2024, and she was surprised that I ranked immersive murder mystery sim The Painscreek Killings so low. I was surprised that she was surprised, since I remembered excoriating it, while she remembered me giving a glowing opinion. It turns out I had done both, at different times, so here is my second-chance attempt at synthesizing my evidently mixed opinion into a holistic review. The Painscreek Killings is a first-person mystery game that "mimics real world investigation". You play as journalist Janet Kelly, who has come to Painscreek to investigate the cold case murder of philanthropist businesswoman Vivian Roberts and the subsequent abandonment of the town. Armed with only a camera and whatever real-life notes you choose to take, your goal is to solve Vivian's murder and get a front page snapshot for your story. Of course, the game is called The Painscreek Killing s , and as you in...

Originally posted January 6, 2025. Recently, I’ve been killing time while my wife is commuting home by checking out the offerings on Acorn TV. The streaming service has a lot of mysteries and a lot of British shows, but it also has quite a few Australian shows that I’d never heard of, which made for a nice change of pace. Mr. and Mrs. Murder (2013), a witty mystery series about a plucky married couple whose cheerful attitudes contrast with their grisly job as crime scene cleaners, was one of these. Verdict: watchable, if you have nothing else to put on. I initially assumed that Mr. and Mrs. Murder was following in the footsteps of the British comedy series The Cleaner (2021), until I realized that it had actually been released in 2013. In that case, it would seem to be the first anglosphere take on the German TV series Der Tatortreiniger (“Crime Scene Cleaner”), which debuted two years earlier, in 2011. That, or it’s just one of those weird cultural zeitgeists where...

Originally posted June 17, 2024. Somehow it had never occurred to me, in the hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours I’d spent bingeing stories just like this, that every whodunit really involved a double murder: of the victim, but also of some intangible but deeply vital part of the killer’s own humanity. Ah, murder mystery games. So much more fun in theory than they are in practice. I won’t deny daydreaming about blowing $1000 to deduct in costume at an isolated ski lodge, even though my experiences with the budget version range from the group coming up with an elaborate spy theory while missing the cigarette clue to “Oops, we all accidentally read our entire character sheets and now have to pretend we don’t know who did it.” They end up being more of a conversation piece for buzzed socializing than an exercise in narrative. On the bright side, you rarely have to wonder if one of your guests is an actual murderer, like the unfortunate protagonist of All Dressed Up by Jil...

Originally posted June 7, 2024. “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized all impossible crimes can be summed up in one word: ‘Misdirection.’” In a genre full of mystery writers-turned-detectives, mystery-readers-turned-detectives, and mystery-actors-turned-detectives, an amateur sleuth who gets into the gig because her family’s construction company builds secret passages was a delightfully funny innovation that immediately drew me to Under Lock & Skeleton Key —the first in Gigi Pandian’s latest series, the Secret Staircase mysteries—which tackles a devious locked room from the perspective of an unusual type of expert. Tempest Raj is an elite Vegas stage magician ( another magician !) living under the cloud of a family curse: the eldest child of each Raj generation is fated to die by magic. The curse claimed Tempest’s aunt Elspeth in a gruesome guillotine magic trick, followed by her mother Emma in a suspicious stage disappearance, and it seems to ...

Originally posted June 5, 2024. “I’m not seriously a suspect?” Juliette said. “I mean, everyone’s a suspect.” “Are you?” “Well… no.” “Why not?” “I’m the narrator.” My conclusion about Benjamin Stevenson’s previous novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone , was that it was best treated as a sort of practical joke on the reader. While the title might make you think it’s something like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), an elaborate tale of family treachery and literal backstabbing, the actual story was a fairly standard mystery where most of your attention is on deciphering the truth about what you’ve been told you will be told. A self-proclaimed “reliable narrator,” Ernest Cunningham promises to be upfront and honest about the truth, then proceeds to bamboozle you with exact-words trickery in the manner of a particularly unfair cryptic crossword. So while I wasn’t sure what to expect of Stevenson’s follow-up, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect , I went in with ...

Originally posted May 31, 2024. Guy Howard: That’s private — Reporter #4: It’s in your series, mate. That makes it public in my book. Full disclosure: I don’t like true crime. I could point to the emotional voyeurism, or the “stranger danger” messaging, but beyond that, true crime is the antithesis of everything I like about, er, fake crime.In a fictional murder mystery, loose ends are tied up neatly. There is a definitive solution that builds order out of chaos. Perhaps justice prevails. In real life, an amateur re-investigation of an unsolved murder is unlikely to bring any particular closure—it’s all just speculation about real things that happened to real people, some of whom may still be alive. But I got a window into what appeal the genre holds from Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter, a mystery novel whose format imitates the transcripts of a fictional true crime documentary, while lightly satirizing the medium it’s doing. (It also fell into a few of the same...

Originally posted May 29, 2024. “One of my names,” she said, “is Nemesis.” “Nemesis? And what does that mean?” “I think you know,” said Miss Marple. “You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.” — Nemesis, by Agatha Christie When my wife gets home from work, we like to unwind with vaguely investigative popcorn shows. The latest that we’ve finished is Ms. Ma, Nemesis ( Miseu Ma: Boksuui Yeosin ) (2018), a Korean thriller-mystery serial created by Hong Chang-wook with writer Park Jin-woo,that loosely adapts the Ms. Ma rple series by Agatha Christie. I was inspired to check it out by the glowing review over on Ah Sweet Mystery! A creative re-imagining of Christie that re-tools the component stories into one longform thriller? Sign me up! We had a great time with it, and the series is an interesting adaptation—but some of its original elements were the parts I liked most. The series is based on five Ms. Marple boo...

Originally posted May 24, 2024. For the ache of mystery is that we are compelled to solve it. For the frustration of mystery is that we are not always able to solve it. You might argue that a “literary thriller” which has the veneer of crime fiction but is actually an elaborate character study, such as 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister by Joyce Carol Oates, does not belong on a detective fiction blog. To which I say: it’s my blog and I get to choose the mandate! Let’s get into it.  48 Clues revolves around the Fulmer sisters, Marguerite and Georgene (referred to by the de-gendered M. and G. both in their lives and in the narration). M., the older sister, is a beautiful, talented heiress and Guggenheim Fellow sculptor, whose apparently charmed life makes her abrupt disappearance all the more baffling. Unremarkable younger sister G. is “sturdy as a turnip,” works at a post office, and has a history of severe mental health issues. One morning, M. heads out ...

Originally posted May 20, 2024. “Ye olde ghosts-of-long-ago. An instance in the present echoes an instance in the past. You certainly can’t write a traditional mystery without it. But, my dear child, […] you’re not in a traditional mystery. You’re in a psychological thriller.” Horror critics frequently discuss the idea that the scares in horror media reflect current cultural anxieties. What does our society find frightening? I think you could argue something similar for mysteries and thrillers: at the most basic level, they rely on cultural ideas of what is a crime . More broadly, you have the question of what is a secret . How many turn-of-the-century stories involve the scandal of an unmarried young woman having children, or a previous relationship? Finally there is the question of what is a plot twist : if I revealed the bloodthirsty serial killer was a woman, or a grade-schooler—Gasp! Shock! Less so if I revealed that the serial killer was (dun dun dun) an adult m...