Why do so many people love a good mystery??

Year after year, mystery and crime novels are among the top sellers in the U. S. and around the world. More readers pick up a crime novel than any other kind of book, except romance, and in some surveys, the mystery genre even outranks the romance. Romance is hardly surprising. I mean who doesn’t want to fall in love again and again, but mystery? What is it that draws so many readers to choose a novel about solving a murder? Why do millions of readers every year rush to their favorite bookstore, or reserve a title at the library or check out the latest on their tablet—all turning pages and waiting breathlessly to stumble upon a dead body?

When asked, avid fans cite several reasons.

Many readers are drawn to solve the puzzle embedded in almost every mystery. Can they figure out “whodunit” before the end and the author reveals the culprit? Can they separate the red herrings from the actual clues to discover who was behind the crime? They find this to be an intellectual quest and—if they care about the characters—an emotional one as well.

Also, the mystery and crime genre provides a little something for pretty much every reading appetite. From the Private Detective Novel to the Police Procedural, from the Legal Thriller to the Cozy, mystery lovers can find whatever level of suspense, romance, intrigue, action and escape their heart desires in some kind of crime novel.

When readers dive into the pages of a book, they are often looking for an escape from the chaotic, volatile world they live in to a world to find one which is more predictable, more under control and, for the most part, more fulfilling. Mystery novels give readers that in spades. Not only do great mystery writers provide readers with characters they love and settings as exotic or as pedestrian as they would like, but in the best mysteries, justice is also done, the villain is caught and punished, and the hero lives for another day–after providing satisfying answers to the whodunit, of course.

Perhaps, bestselling crime and mystery writer David Baldacci put it best: “When times are stressful and it looks like the bad are winning over the good, along comes the genre of crime novels to put the balance back in life. People don’t like it when folks who do bad, get away with it. In real life they do, for a variety of reasons. But in crime novels, evil is punished, the good guys win after solving the puzzle. And all is right with the world, at least fictionally.

Perhaps the question should be: who wouldn’t love a good mystery?

That’s what we’re all about.

Randy Overbeck