Killer Books: A Reader's Guide to Exploring the Popular World of Mystery and Suspense

A guide to the mystery genre uses readers' tastes in subject matter, genre, movies, and TV shows to discover which mystery writers they will most enjoy

Grade 9 Up?The authors of By a Woman's Hand: A Guide to Mystery Fiction (Berkley, 1996) have produced another guide to mysteries that is sure to send teens to libraries and bookstores with a long list of books they just have to read. Each chapter covers a different subgenre: private eyes, historical mysteries, etc., and includes a wide variety of authors with a fairly detailed description of their writing style, series, and character(s). For each subgenre, there are overviews, books for further reading, and a list of films and television shows. Scattered throughout are asides, e.g., mysteries with musical themes or a listing of authors of detectives who like to fish. Titles are indexed by character, geographic location, and author. Libraries that own Willetta L. Heising's Detecting Women (1994), Detecting Women 2 (1996), and Detecting Men (1997, all Purple Moon) will find that Killer Books complements but does not replace those titles. A fun-to-read introduction to mysteries, this can be enjoyed on its own or used as a readers' advisory tool.?Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
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