Best Mystery Books Achieve

The best mystery books achieve one thing with their plots: they are able to retain readers successfully gnawing curiosity up until the very end of the whole drama. Doing this requires the skills of a devilishly skillful writer who knows how to play with human psychology and hard facts in order to create a web of confusion in which readers will want to lose themselves happily.

Not all mystery novels out there have this ability, though. If you are in search of the best mystery books to add to your collection or to recommend to your class, family, friends, or colleagues, there are some factors that you need to scratch off your list of qualifications:

Best Mystery Books

It’s exciting to tag along with the adventures of an extensively educated, full-fledged sleuth, but what’s even more fun is going through the whole adventure with an average person (like the rest of the readers out there). This makes the protagonist more endearing and relatable, and readers will be able to identify with this kind of character right away (or maybe imagine themselves to be THE protagonist). Readers are more likely to stick with the character until the very end if they can see themselves more as the protagonist

Best Mystery Books-Subconsciously “Expected”

There’s nothing more annoying than following a mystery adventure, only to find out that the antagonist doesn’t belong to the circle of suspects and, in fact, doesn’t belong in the community at all.

Case in point: nobody in the list of suspects killed the guy—he just got hit by a random drunk driver. I think you would agree this would be a bummer of an ending. The best mystery books have the ability to weave in subtle hints of clues (without readers actually thinking they’re clues) that will all fall into place in the end. This will make the readers want to go back through the various chapters to look for those clues and exasperatingly tell themselves “How come I missed that one?!” If a mystery is able to engage the readers’ minds this deeply, you’ve got yourself a killer mystery novel—no pun intended.

Best Mystery Books-Stereotype-defying

Once there was a widely popular mystery novel which included among its list of suspects a loud, unpleasant, and rude suspect and a quiet, nice guy with a dark past. You might think the killer could be the rude guy, but then again you think this is too stereotypical, and so you bet on the quiet guy being the antagonist–after all, he has a dark past–until you find out in the end that the rude guy is actually the killer. A creative mystery plot toys with people’s tendency to stereotype and takes it to a whole new level. If a mystery book can make the readers think that anyone can be a suspect, the readers will likely stick around to satisfy their curiosity about which among them is truly the antagonist.

These three characteristics of the best mystery books make reading a wild and adventurous journey for the readers. Mystery fans read sleuthing novels for the fun of the chase, the head-scratching clues, and the unexpected turn of events resulting from a torturous mind game. If all of these are achieved in a sleuthing novel, it will easily gain a massive following that will elevate its status up there with the best mystery books of all time.