A book with something real hidden behind it - Kit Williams buried a golden hare and painted the directions into Masquerade; people are still digging for later ones.
An escape room you can do at the kitchen table: riddles that unlock the next page, and an answer key you are not supposed to open. Journal 29 and the EXIT books are the usual way in.
One murder, a grid of suspects, weapons and locations, and just enough clues to eliminate everything but the answer. There are hundreds, in books and one a day online.
The three novels everyone starts with, plus the first collection of Strand stories.
Seven contradictory accounts of one killing in a bamboo grove, the dead man's included; the source of Rashomon.
Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf in exile in New York; Willingham's fairy-tale noir.
Urasawa remakes an Astro Boy story as a murder mystery about robots and war.
Childhood friends and a cult leader who copies their game; Urasawa's conspiracy epic.
A Greenlandic-Danish scientist investigates a boy's fall from a roof in Copenhagen.
Five parts, a missing German novelist and the murdered women of Santa Teresa; Bolano's unfinished monument.
A missing cat, a missing wife and a dry well in a Tokyo suburb; Murakami's big one.
An old woman in a Silesian village and hunters who keep dying; Tokarczuk's eco-thriller.
Six classics students at a Vermont college and the murder they commit; Donna Tartt's debut.
A murder among Ottoman miniaturists in 1591 Istanbul, told by everyone including the colour red.
A disgraced journalist and a hacker investigate a forty-year-old disappearance; Larsson's Millennium trilogy begins.
A 15-year-old with Asperger's investigates a dead poodle and finds out about his mother.
A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marsh and a murder trial; the bestseller of the 2010s.
A boy in postwar Barcelona finds a novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and someone is burning every copy.
A man alone in an infinite house of statues and tides; Susanna Clarke's second novel.
Ten strangers on an island die one by one; Christie's best-selling book.
The second Mrs de Winter at Manderley in the shadow of the first; "last night I dreamt".
Oedipa Maas and a secret postal system; Pynchon in 150 pages.
Poirot, a snowbound train and twelve suspects; the solution everyone knows and still enjoys.
Sam Spade and the black bird; the hard-boiled detective novel in its first form.
Philip Marlowe's first case in a corrupt Los Angeles; Chandler's similes.
Watson meets Holmes at Baker Street and a body with RACHE on the wall; the first case, 1887.
A stolen treasure, a one-legged man and Watson falling in love, in the second novel.
A lawsuit that outlives everyone in it, and the fog over Chancery; Dickens' biggest novel.
The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.
A spectral dog on Dartmoor and the most famous Holmes novel of all.
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