You Are the Detective and other mysteries to get excited about!

You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper comes out tomorrow! In celebration, here’s a roundup of mysteries to keep on your radar this Fall, including The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson, a futuristic tale full of twists; the very genre-aware The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder by Kate Emery, and Oblivion Bride, a haunting dystopian novella by Caitlin Starling.

These books run the gamut of mystery subgenres, and they all offer fast-paced engrossing good times!

You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder

Maureen Johnson and illustrator Jay Cooper worked together on Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, which came out back in 2021, and have rejoined forces now to present The Creeping Hand Murder, a dossier in which both written and visual evidence is presented to the reader as documents, so that you, dear reader, can solve the murder yourself. Kind of like the premise of The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers or the collected emails and text messages in a Janice Hallett mystery, but with the added interactive features of the Cooper’s illustrations holding clues, and in the physical copy of the book, a “reveal” of the solution at the end.

In You are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, which comes out September 16 from Clarkson Potter, it is 1933 in London and seven people – not precisely friends – have received a mysterious summons to a gathering where one of them is murdered. This is exactly my jam. I am ready to rewatch CLUE right now. To solve this mystery, you read over newspaper articles, interview transcripts, collected notes, and scrutinize snapshots of the scene, uncovering sordid histories of the characters as well as the truth of how the murder occurred.

The Heist of Hollow London

I enjoyed Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, Eddie Robson’s speculative murder mystery from 2022, so I was excited to see that The Heist of Hollow London (which comes out from Tor on September 30) has another futuristic setting. In terms of genre it does what it says on the tin, and provides all the team dynamics and twists you could want from a heist story with some murders thrown in.

In The Heist of Hollow London, the setting is a future world that is entirely corporate, where constructed influencers owned by corporations spend their whole lives representing the brands. When one of those massive corporations fails, two of the indentured influencers get snapped up by mysterious woman who has a proposition for them and the rest of the team she assembles: sneak into the hollowed-out remains of fallen London, insinuate themselves into a high-security facility, and steal a McGuffin. In exchange, she offers them freedom for the rest of their lives. Let the twists begin!

The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder

I’ve been a fan of murder mysteries for a long time, and thus the recent trend towards extremely self-aware and referential murder mysteries is very satisfying. The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder has a teen protagonist and some of the hallmarks of YA mystery, but it has far more in common with books like Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, and You Are Fatally Invited, other genre-reference saturated murder mysteries I’ve read recently.

We follow along with 14 year old Ruth, at a family weekend that goes wildly wrong when a dead body is discovered. As an example of how self-referential it is, Ruth starts chapter 3 like this: “Am I taking too long to get to the murder? I might be taking too long to get to the murder. But without this helpful scene-setting you’d have missed the clues about who did it. Did you notice them? There’ll be others.”

It is very fun! The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder by Kate Emery has been published elsewhere as My Family and Other Suspects. It comes out in the US with the current title on October 21 from Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Oblivion Bride

Oblivion Bride, out already from Neon Hemlock, is an atmospheric novella about curses and not trusting yourself. This is the third book I have read by Caitlin Starling, and so far they have all explored the question: what if your entire support system was one person and you were not sure you could trust them?

In Oblivion Bride, a walled city protects its denizens from the swirling magical chaos outside, but inside, Lorelei’s prestigious family keeps dying. Finally, she is the only one left, and must take on the mantle of the family as well as an arranged marriage with a much older woman, a powerful military magic-user. As the story also explores their relationship and fertility issues, Lorelei’s new spouse tries to solve the mystery of what is killing her family.