If you want to take a master class in suspense, look no further than a mystery novel with multiple perspectives. Somehow, the writer is able to switch to another character or timeline so swiftly that you’re left at the edge of your seat at the end of each chapter. These are the kinds of books that perfectly converge each narrative in an ending so satisfying that you’re rendered speechless long after. So, if you’re looking for a story with suspense that will keep you reading into the night, here are some mysteries with multiple POVs that will do the trick.
8 Master-Class Mysteries Told from Multiple Perspectives
Mixing murder, baked goods, and a famous television show creates the perfect recipe for a delicious mystery. THE GOLDEN SPOON follows the six bakers invited to compete on TV’s hottest baking show, Bake Week, which takes place on the grounds of the striking Grafton estate in Vermont. But when the competition turns deadly, everyone is a suspect. Smoothly blending each character’s storyline together to create a shocking twist, THE GOLDEN SPOON will keep you guessing until the very end.
“This delicious combination of Clue and The Great British Bakeoff kept me turning the pages all night!” —Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Only Murders in the Building meets The Maid in this darkly beguiling locked-room mystery where someone turns up dead on the set of TV’s hottest baking competition—perfect for fans of Nita Prose, Richard Osman, and Anthony Horowitz.
Every summer for the past ten years, six awe-struck bakers have descended on the grounds of Grafton, the leafy and imposing Vermont estate that is not only the filming site for “Bake Week” but also the childhood home of the show’s famous host, celebrated baker Betsy Martin.
The author of numerous bestselling cookbooks and hailed as “America’s Grandmother,” Betsy Martin isn’t as warm off-screen as on, though no one needs to know that but her. She has always demanded perfection, and gotten it with a smile, but this year something is off. As the baking competition commences, things begin to go awry. At first, it’s merely sabotage—sugar replaced with salt, a burner turned to high—but when a body is discovered, everyone is a suspect.
A sharp and suspenseful thriller for mystery buffs and avid bakers alike, The Golden Spoon is a brilliant puzzle filled with shocking twists and turns that will keep you reading late into the night until you turn the very last page of this incredible debut.
Set against the backdrop of the 1950s Scottish Highlands, NORTH SEA REQUIEM follows members on the staff of the Highland Gazette—each determined to solve a mystery and get a spot on the front page—as well as Mae Bell, an American searching for any information on her missing husband. So, when a severed leg is discovered, it’s exciting news for the Gazette. Only after a violent incident and threatening letters are sent to both the staff members and Mae do they all realize that there’s something much more dangerous at hand.
The fourth gripping, evocative, and lyrical mystery in the acclaimed series that brilliantly evokes the Scottish Highlands of the 1950s.
FROM THE AUTHOR WHO “BRILLIANTLY EVOKES THE LIFE OF A SMALL SCOTTISH TOWN” (RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH ) COMES A NOVEL THAT UNCOVERS THE DEEP AND LASTING DIVISIONS OF A COMMUNITY AND ITS PEOPLE.
When a small-town Scottish woman discovers a severed leg in the boot of one of the local hockey players’ uniforms, it’s a big scoop for the Highland Gazette. But reporter Joanne Ross wants a front-page story of her own, and she hopes to find it in Mae Bell, an American jazz singer whose husband disappeared in an aircraft accident five years ago and who is searching the Highlands for her husband’s colleagues.
Things take a very sinister turn when Nurse Urquhart, who dis-covered the limb, suffers a hideous and brutal attack. Even stranger, she was the recipient of letters warning her to keep her nose out of someone’s business—letters that Mae Bell and the staff of the Highland Gazette also received. What could it all mean?
Unfolding against a gorgeously rendered late 1950s Scottish countryside, North Sea Requiem captures the mores and issues of another era, especially in Joanne Ross—a woman wrestling with divorce, career, and a boss who wants to be more than just her superior. The result is a poignant, often haunting mix of violence, loss, and redemption in a narrative full of unnerving plot twists and unforgettable characters.
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IRON LAKE is the first novel in a series of mysteries featuring William Kent Krueger’s iconic character, private investigator Cork O’Connor. Small town Aurora, Minnesota, doesn’t see a lot of crime, so the news of the local judge’s murder completely shocks the entire community. Not too long after, a young Eagle Scout is reported missing. Something sinister is clearly at play. The case pulls former cop Cork O’Connor out of a downward personal spiral and back into the world of justice. Disturbing secrets are uncovered as the narratives shift between the main characters, revealing just how close to home this mystery hits for Cork.
The 20th anniversary edition of the first novel in William Kent Krueger’s beloved and bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series—includes an exclusive bonus short story!
“A brilliant achievement, and one every crime reader and writer needs to celebrate.” —Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Glass Houses
“A master craftsman [and] a series of books written with a grace and precision so stunning that you’d swear the stories were your own.” —Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire series
“Among thoughtful readers, William Kent Krueger holds a very special place in the pantheon.” —C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Disappeared
In eighteen novels over twenty years, William Kent Krueger has enthralled readers with the adventures of P.I. Cork O’Connor, former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota—selling more than 1.5 million copies of his books and winning the Edgar Award, Minnesota Book Award, Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, Dilys Award, Lovey Award, and Anthony Award along the way. Now, in this special anniversary edition, longtime fans and new readers alike can read the novel that first introduced Corcoran “Cork” O’Connor to the world.
Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Cork is having difficulty dealing with the marital meltdown that has separated him from his children, getting by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt. Once a cop on Chicago’s South Side, there’s not much that can shock him. But when the town’s judge is brutally murdered, and a young Eagle Scout is reported missing, Cork takes on this complicated and perplexing case of conspiracy, corruption, and a small-town secret that hits painfully close to home.
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A thousand dead starlings may have fallen from the sky on to the town of Mount Oanoke but the bigger cause of concern for the town is that Nate Winters, beloved baseball coach and teacher, is being investigated after news cameras catch him in an intimate moment with a student and after accusations are made by that same student, Lucia. And after Lucia disappears, the small town has no doubt that Nate was responsible, but Lucia’s journal might hold clues to his innocence. Told from the alternating perspectives of Nate, his wife Alecia, and his coworker Bridget—who might just be the only person to truly believe his claims of innocence—THE BLACKBIRD SEASON is a suspenseful and haunting mystery built around a timeline of the weeks leading up to the falling birds and the days after.
“Exceptional…a deliciously sinister glimpse into the duplicity of small-town lives and the ease with which people turn on each other when tragedy comes calling. Moretti's tale of jealousy and obsession is nothing less than dark magic. Witchery indeed." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Known for novels featuring “great pacing and true surprises” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) and “nerve-shattering suspense” (Heather Gudenkauf, New York Time bestselling author), New York Times bestselling author Kate Moretti’s latest is the story of a scandal-torn Pennsylvania town and the aftermath of a troubled girl gone missing.
“Where did they come from? Why did they fall? The question would be asked a thousand times…
Until, of course, more important question arose, at which time everyone promptly forgot that a thousand birds fell on the town of Mount Oanoke at all.”
In a quiet Pennsylvania town, a thousand dead starlings fall onto a high school baseball field, unleashing a horrifying and unexpected chain of events that will rock the close-knit community.
Beloved baseball coach and teacher Nate Winters and his wife, Alecia, are well respected throughout town. That is, until one of the many reporters investigating the bizarre bird phenomenon catches Nate embracing a wayward student, Lucia Hamm, in front of a sleazy motel. Lucia soon buoys the scandal by claiming that she and Nate are engaged in an affair, throwing the town into an uproar…and leaving Alecia to wonder if her husband has a second life.
And when Lucia suddenly disappears, the police only to have one suspect: Nate.
Nate’s coworker and sole supporter, Bridget Harris, Lucia’s creative writing teacher, is determined to prove his innocence. She has Lucia’s class journal, and while some of the entries appear particularly damning to Nate’s case, others just don’t add up. Bridget knows the key to Nate’s exoneration and the truth of Lucia’s disappearance lie within the walls of the school and in the pages of that journal.
Told from the alternating points of view of Alecia, Nate, Lucia, and Bridget, The Blackbird Season is a haunting, psychologically nuanced suspense, filled with Kate Moretti’s signature “chillingly satisfying” (Publishers Weekly) twists and turns.
In the rural Mexican town of La Matosa, a body is discovered in the canal—the body of the one the town’s inhabitants call “the Witch.” The locals of La Matosa are oppressed by poverty, violence, corruption, and the onslaught of the hurricane season, and it has left them in a constant state of fear. But was the Witch—portrayed in local tales as using her mystic powers to cast spells and hoard riches—a casualty of that fear? With each chapter told from a different character who was somehow involved in the murder, HURRICANE SEASON is a skillfully crafted narrative of suspense that you’ll be thinking about for weeks after turning the final page.
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On the late-summer morning her family planned to drop their college-bound daughter off at school, Linsey Hart is nowhere to be found. WHEN SHE WAS GONE recounts the five days following her disappearance, each chapter focusing on a different neighbor—all harboring terrible secrets. But were any of those secrets the reason she disappeared? Her mother searches for answers from door-to-door, each neighbor sharing revealing glimpses into their own lives while slowly revealing the truth of what happened to Linsey that morning.
Tom Perotta’s Little Children meets Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors.
What happened to Linsey Hart? When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions.
Linsey’s neighbors are just ordinary people—but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. There’s Linsey’s mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious; Mr. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave; Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest; Timmy, Linsey’s lovelorn ex-boyfriend; and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor.
As the days of Linsey’s absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of The Orphan Sister explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in. . . .
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MIRACLE CREEK tells the stories of a small group of people who are connected not only by the special treatment center they visit several times a week—hoping that the treatment cures their children or themselves of a range of conditions—but also by a horrific incident. When the hyperbaric chamber at the treatment center that they had all hoped would make life simpler explodes with several patients inside, life becomes anything but simple. Framed around the criminal trial of one of the patients’ mothers—accused of intentionally killing her son and close friend by setting fire to the chamber’s oxygen tanks—the truth of this terrible event is slowly revealed as each character reevaluates their actions leading up to that devastating evening.
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Instead of following multiple characters, THE INFINITE BLACKTOP follows the same character—Claire DeWitt—at different stages of her life. Her first POV is as a young girl in Brooklyn, inseparable from her two best friends. They solve mystery cases together—until one vanishes without a trace. Later in life, Claire is working to get her PI license and takes on a cold case the LAPD has all but given up on. Finally, in present time, Claire is solving the mystery of who is trying to hunt her down. The narratives converge in a surprising conclusion that solves some mysteries but leaves Claire—and the reader—with even more questions.
Photo credit: iStock / Mikhail Blavatskiy