It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚

Let’s talk about anything about books:

• Your favorite book(s)
• Your favorite author(s)
• Your book you wrote
• What book you still remember 20 years later (or 10 or 5 or 1)
• What book astounded you and why

Stuff like that.

Today I’d like to talk about Mysteries, and more specifically, murder mysteries. 

Along with Science Fiction, the genre of Murder Mysteries has been my mainstay for reading material for fun for coming up on 50 years now. Because I started reading mysteries as a kid… 

The Encyclopedia Brown series

Everyone’s favorite boy detective! Leroy Brown, aka Encyclopedia Brown, can solve any crime for just 25 cents a day (plus expenses), and usually before dinner time.

For fifty years, Encyclopedia Brown has been the best boy detective on the block and a favorite character for generations of middle-grade readers. Following the classic formula, this installment presents ten mysteries, complete with answers at the end of the book that allow the reader to solve the cases, too. Join Encyclopedia as he takes on the cases of an African killfish, a library book vandal, and a nail-biting soccer game.

The Madeline L’Engle quartet of books starting with A Wrinkle in Time: 

A Wrinkle in Time

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract”.

Meg’s father had been experimenting with this fifth dimension of time travel when he mysteriously disappeared. Now the time has come for Meg, her friend Calvin, and Charles Wallace to rescue him. But can they outwit the forces of evil they will encounter on their heart-stopping journey through space?

Tom Swift 

This link offers the first 28 titles in this series free to read, because they’ve fallen into the public demain. While many seem to see these stories as ‘adventure novels’, as a kid I remember that they were more like adventures in exploring to figure out a mystery. 

It also offers links to a lot of other mystery series for young readers, like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries (see the bottom of the page) 

Tom Swift is the eponymous hero in the 38 volume Tom Swift series published by Grosset & Dunlap from 1910 to 1935 and two Whitman Better Little Books published 1938 to 1941. The stories are basically adventure tales with Tom's latest invention being heavily involved in the plot.  

In the original series, Tom Swift lives in fictional Shopton, New York. He is the son of Barton Swift, the founder of the Swift Construction Company. Tom's mother is deceased, but the housekeeper, Mrs. Baggert, functions as a surrogate mother. Tom usually shares his adventures with close friend Ned Newton, who eventually becomes the Swift Construction Company's financial manager. 

Tom Swift Jr 

Tom Swift Jr., son of the famous inventor of a generation ago. Young Tom is now an inventor in his own right. As an associate in his father's great enterprise at Shopton, his brilliant mind is seething with the inventive genius that will make him even better known than his father.

In this first exciting book of the new TOM SWIFT JR. series, Tom's gigantic flying laboratory will carry you faster than sound into a thrilling struggle against a gang of international enemies. Tom must overcome the scheming of this game as well as terrific mechanical problems to build his fabulous aircraft, which will soar straight up from the ground, fly at supersonic speeds, and carry scout planes in it's own hanger.

After reading such great mystery stories in my elementary years onward, I graduated to much more adult Mystery reading once I hit my teens and 20s.

In the 1980/1990 era, I read many mysteries cleverly disguised as romance novels, written by authors like Amanda Quick. 

Amanda Quick aka Jayne Ann Krentz

Hollywood’s Golden Age and a murder mystery collide in Amanda Quick’s taut page turner ‘Tightrope’

A serial killer, a feisty trapeze artist and the glamorous milieu of 1930s Southern California: Seattle author Amanda Quick has returned to the fictitious resort town of Burning Cove for another page turner involving lifestyles of the rich and infamous. “Tightrope” is the third novel in this series, set in Hollywood’s Golden Age and full of period detail.

Quick, one of the pseudonyms of best-selling author Jayne Ann Krentz, sets an intriguing stage for her heroine, famous trapeze artist Amalie Vaughn, who is badly shaken by a too-close encounter with a serial killer, whom she daringly dispatches. No wonder Amalie decides to pursue a quiet life by investing all her money in the purchase of a charming seaside mansion/hotel at Hidden Beach. Unfortunately, she has not realized that the mansion, where a famous Hollywood psychic died by suicide, is said to be cursed.

In more recent years I’ve come to love a well written mystery, and love it even more if it is a series and not just a stand alone novel - so that I get the chance to learn more about the main characters and their backstory. 

Like the Rockton series and the related Haven’s Rock series by Kelley Armstrong (who also writes a lot of fantasy, some of which is also mystery-aligned reading). 

Kelley Armstrong 

The Rockton stories feature a female homicide detective and a born and raised in the Yukon wilderness sheriff of a tiny, hidden community made up of a few staffers and a dozen or so “guests”, who are all there because they are hiding from something — escaping an abusive relationship, hiding from the Law, and a lot of other (sometimes) offbeat or just weird reasons. 

Don’t look for Rockton on any map of the Yukon. This tiny, off-the-grid town doesn’t exist. Neither do the people in it. They’re all on the run from their pasts, needing a place where they can disappear for a few years.

From the blurb for the 1st book in the Rockton series, City of the Lost: 

Casey Duncan once killed a man and got away with it. But that’s not why she’s on the run. Her best friend Diana’s ex has found her again, despite all Casey has done to protect her. And Diana has decided the only way she’ll ever be safe is if she finds a mythical town that will hide people like her. Turns out the town exists, and it will take Diana, but only if Casey, a talented young police detective, comes along.

Imagine a secret town, isolated in the Yukon wilderness, deliberately cut off from the world, where everyone is pretending to be someone they’re not. Even good people can get up to some very bad stuff.

I just love these stories, and the more I learn about the main characters, the more I love them. I was devastated to learn that Armstrong was ending the Rockton series with the final 7th book, The Deepest of Secrets… until I saw a blurb for a new book in a follow-on series which still featured the detective, Casey Duncan and that wilderness sheriff, Eric Dalton. Which I put on pre-order that very day! 

Haven’s Rock

Blurb from the author’s URL about the new series: 

 

Murder at Haven’s Rock

Haven’s Rock, Yukon. Population: 0 Deep in the Yukon wilderness, a town is being built. A place for people to disappear, a fresh start from a life on the run. Haven’s Rock isn’t the first town of this kind, something detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, know first hand. They met in the original town of Rockton. But greed and deception led the couple to financing a new refuge for those in need. This time around, they get to decide which applicants are approved for residency. There’s only one rule in Haven’s Rock: stay out of the forest. When two of the town’s construction crew members break it and go missing, Casey and Eric are called in ahead of schedule to track them down. When a body is discovered, well hidden with evidence of foul play, Casey and Eric must find out what happened to the dead woman, and locate the still missing man. The woman stumbled upon something she wasn’t supposed to see, and the longer Casey and Eric don’t know what happened, the more danger everyone is in.

My final mystery series which I think everyone should read? 

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells 

The first book is Network Effect, and while the blurb for the books is spare, I assure you reading that book will seem like it is filled to the gills with all sorts of stuff that you likely never, ever, not-even-once would have thought of, without reading the books first. 

Blurb: 

I'm usually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are. When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.

So, what sort of mystery books are you all reading? What ones have stuck with you as eminently re-readable down the years? Who are your favorite mystery authors? 

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