in times of economic woe...
mysteries seem to sell really well. Why is this? People are afraid of losing their jobs, so they want to read about other people committing crimes?
...It's worrying how plausible that is.
So in honor of the life of crime I myself may soon be turning to, MYSTERY AUTHORS.
P.J. Tracy
P.J. Tracy is a mother-daughter team that writes mysteries based mainly in Minneapolis. They are all kinds of awesome. Apparently they have to be in the same room to write dialogue, so they can act it out and run around and stand on chairs and...you know...all those necessary things. They drive the rest of the family away. :D
Monkeewrench is their first book. It's about a catch-the-serial-killer computer game that some serial killer takes a liking to and starts imitating. The game designers are not pleased. Seriously, seriously not pleased. They are also clearly hiding something, but you the reader are fairly sure that whatever it is, it isn't homicidal tendencies.
The police are not so sure of this. The early interactions with the police tend to go along the lines of:
Gino-the-cop: Hi. I THINK YOU'RE A BUNCH OF MURDEROUS LOONS.
Harley-the-designer: Hi. I HATE COPS.
Leo-the-cop: Hello, I am the voice of reason on this side.
Grace-the-designer: Funny. There is no voice of reason on our side.
Now, depending on how it was written, this could be very annoying. But it isn't. It's kind of fantastic. You just want to say, "Aw, shucks, guys. If you could stop screaming at each other for five minutes together, you'd be such friends! ...But this is hilarious too, so whatever."
There is also a lapsed Catholic cop in Wisconsin who always hangs around with a priest. I'm not getting into his story. Just throwing out that he exists. AND IS AWESOME.
Ian Rankin
I think he has a cult following. Or rather, Rebus does.
Detective Inspector John Rebus of Edinburgh is the main character of Ian Rankin's best-known series. Rebus hates people, he hates life, he hates himself, and he is trying, with fair determination, to drink himself into an early grave.
Strangely, you can't help but love him. He's a brilliant guy, very observant, maybe oversensitive. Definitely becoming a policeman was the stupidest thing he could possibly have done. He's tragically Scottish and weirdly adorable.
That said, I do not advise reading more than one or two Rebus books at a time. Too much Rebus at once is...assuredly bad for your mental health.
The Falls is a good book to start with, because it ends on an...upbeat?...note. Upbeat for Rebus, anyway. And it has Siobhan in it, and I love Siobhan. Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke; she's only slightly too old to be Rebus's daughter. She frets over him like he's her dad. This is a spectacularly self-defeating thing to do, and no one knows it better than Siobhan. Except maybe the reader, who is doing exactly the same thing.
Hilariously, Ian Rankin has spent a lot of pages explaining to anyone who's interested and several hundred people who weren't that he's not as crazy as Rebus.
Dude. Yes, you are. Maybe not in quite the same way, but yes, you clearly are.
Dennis Lehane
His books are always set, to quote a fellow Dennis Lehane-lover, "in Boston or in some fake place that pretends to be somewhere else but is actually Boston." He grew up in Dorchester and knows whereof he speaks when it comes to Boston, so I'm for it.
His first series started with A Drink Before the War. The main characters are two PIs named Patrick and Angie. Their relationship is almost as messed up as everything else in their lives, but it works for them. They're so dysfunctionally cute. All their friends (including Bubba, who is a sociopath) are endearing, and even people who are completely evil are interesting to read about. The plots, meanwhile, are cool and deranged and often really, really creepy. Prayers for Rain, for instance. Zephy had to wait for morning and read it in the sunshine. :)
But a Boston guy I talked to claimed that the Patrick and Angie series was entertaining and had good "Masshole dialogue," but it wasn't ~*~*great literature*~*~ or anything. Whatever that means.
I would argue that his later book, Mystic River, is great literature. Or at least I enjoyed the hell out of it, and found it deep and sad and all those things great literature is supposed to be. It's also a stand-alone book, which can be nice when you're tired of series and ready for a conclusion.
Looking this over, I'd say I mostly read mysteries for the charmingly embittered characters in them. Is that weird? That's probably weird.
Anyway. Go forth and read mysteries. >:]