Mystery Book Reviews

The best mystery book reviews. Mysteries are typically crime stories in which readers follows a detective or amateur sleuth attempting to solve a criminal puzzle. Compared with “crime thrillers,” mysteries often feature less graphic violence and shocking subject matter.

Watching You, a Brilliant Psychological Thriller by Lisa Jewell

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The Bottom Line: Rear Window meets The Woman in the Window. Highly recommended. What’s creepier than a peeping Tom? How about an obsessive, socially dysfunctional teenager who spends all his free time watching and cataloguing the movements of his neighbors? He even has nicknames for them, like “red boots.” Oh, did I mention that his biggest dream is to become a spy? Melville Heights is […]

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Verses for the Dead, a New Classic by Preston & Child

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The Bottom Line: Preston and Child shake up their Agent Pendergast series, and in doing so, elevate it to a new level. What could be worse than an extended government shutdown? For the eccentric Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast, the answer is a leadership overhaul at the FBI New York field office. Pendergast likes to work alone, and thanks to the agency shakeup, those days are seemingly

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Butterfly Hill, a Captivating Heist Novel by Brendan le Grange

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The Bottom Line: An exotic, utterly captivating heist novel featuring one of the genre’s most entertaining detectives. Butterfly Hill opens as fugitive stowaway Hiko Shimizu escapes the lower deck of a rusting fireboat, only to swim through toxic Hong Kong waters to find his father, a legendary bank robber. To say Hiko’s family is dysfunctional would be a vast understatement. Hiko may have plotted to

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Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

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The Bottom Line: For Game of Thrones completionists only. Game of Thrones fans come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the literary to TV-only crowd. There are no reliable stats as to how many readers the TV-show has generated, but more than a few TV-to-book converts have complained that the epic is about as readable as Moby Dick (not very), and at best, are

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Nine Perfect Strangers, a Hilarious New Mystery by Liane Moriarty

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The Bottom Line: Fans of Big Little Lies are already on board with this lighthearted mystery, and you should be too. Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they

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Lethal White, a new Cormoran Strike Novel by Robert Galbraith

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The Bottom Line: The best of J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series to date. For those not familiar with the series, Strike is a private investigator, ex–Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch investigator and the illegitimate son of famous rock star Johnny Rokeby. Strike lost part of a leg in an attack in Afghanistan. He had previously studied at Oxford, but left in his second year

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The Fisherman’s Daughter, a Mesmerizing FBI Thriller by Robin Barefield

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The Bottom Line: A mesmerizing FBI thriller set in the Alaskan wilderness. After the bodies of four murdered women are found on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, FBI Special Agent Nick Morgan flies to Kodiak to aid in the investigation. Morgan’s local contact, Alaska State Trooper Dan Patterson, fears a serial killer is at work. But finding the perpetrator won’t be easy. The victims have very little

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James Swain

The King Tides, a Gripping Crime Thriller by James Swain

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The Bottom Line: A delicious book about vigilante justice that will surprise you at every turn. Most of us never have to deal with even a single stalker. What if you had a seemingly endless string of them? In the first book in James Swain’s Lancaster & Daniels series, Nicki Pearl is the perfect daughter. Almost too perfect. Wherever she goes, she’s being watched. Each

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Lily White Lie, a Cozy Mystery by Connie Chappell

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The Bottom Line: Fans of cozy mysteries will enjoy this latest Wrenn Grayson series book. The latest entry in the Connie Chappell’s Wrenn Grayson series begins with a family investigation. The twenty-nine-year-old historian is spending Thanksgiving week alone at their rural farmhouse when an uninvited visitor arrives. Bret Kilmore, an old college friend of Wrenn’s boyfriend of seven years, Gideon Junior, claims to have a

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Until Proven Innocent, a Highly Recommended Teen Mystery by Laura Stewart Schmidt

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The Bottom Line: A deftly-written, all-American teen mystery deserving of a broad audience. When a Minnesota Alzheimer’s patient implies knowledge about an unsolved death dating back to the 1960s, his 15-year-old granddaughter launches an investigation. Until Proven Innocent begins as a local university is buying the former home of Henry Springs, who disappeared after a fire claimed the lives of his wife and daughter some

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