At the heart of every mystery is a puzzle waiting to be solved. Through hidden clues, unexpected turns, and carefully kept secrets, the genre draws readers into the search for truth, inviting them to solve the puzzle alongside the characters.
70,000 to 90,000 words.
Generally fast paced.
Readers who love a bit of good sleuthing.
A puzzle worth solving, with a surprising ending.
Print, eBook & Audiobook.
The mystery genre is a contract between writer and reader: here is a puzzle, and everything you need to solve it is on these pages. A mystery that works depends on four things: a compelling central question, clues planted in fair view, misdirection that plays fair, and a solution that lands as both a surprise and an inevitability.
The cozy mystery is a gentle, low-violence puzzle, usually set in a small, close-knit community and solved by an amateur sleuth, with the gore kept firmly off the page. It is arguably the most important subgenre for independent authors
The whodunit is the classic heart of the genre, where the central question is simply who did it and the reader races the detective to the answer. These mysteries live on fair play: an ingenious puzzle whose solution the reader could, in theory, have reached from the very same clues.
Historical mysteries set the puzzle in the past, using a richly researched period as both backdrop and constraint, the detective has to solve the crime with the knowledge and tools of their time.
The police procedural follows professional investigators working a case by the book: forensics, interviews, paperwork, and the grind of real detection. The best procedurals turn the machinery of investigation itself into suspense, and often use the squad room to explore character and society.
The locked-room mystery sets the purest kind of puzzle: a crime that appears physically impossible, committed in a sealed space or under circumstances that seem to rule out any culprit.
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