Cozy serial killers

May 15, 2021 12:21 am

Murderers: Gotta catch em all?

I started reading a cozy mystery the other day. If you look too closely, cozy mysteries are really dark. Murders in real life tend to be “I was angry because she broke up with me so I shot her” or “The guy slipped on beer during our bar fight and hit the back of his head” or “junkie is strung out and desperate for a hit.” Not that those aren’t all tragic and horrible, but they lack the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Agatha Christie set, who usually kill for reasons like “I wanted to inherit from my uncle but he was about to cut me out of his will.”

Frequently a second person is murdered because they were getting too close to find out who killed the person. How sick and wrong is that? Not that there are a whole lot of good reasons to murder someone, but “they knew too much” seems like the dumbest of reasons, especially when eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable. If you wanted to get away with murder, it would be easier and more reliable to just tamper with the evidence. Maybe I think about these things too much.

The nice thing about murder mysteries is that they provide a pretty solid framework for setting and character. You know where this train is going and you know how it will get there, so you can just enjoy the ride. Faerie's Killer follows the murder mystery structure pretty well, but you'll get the fun of faeries and vampires and magic, with a little bit of spiritual mysticism thrown in. If you haven't read any of the other novels, Faerie's Killer is a good starting point.

They say that most fantasy readers will also read mystery, but that most mystery readers won’t make the switch to fantasy. If you’re on this list it probably means you read fantasy, but do you read mystery too?