10 Best Absolute Zero Mystery Books: Seemingly Unsolvable?
Well, folks, buckle up because we're about to dive headfirst into the heart of darkness. You know, those kind of mysteries that are as cold and hard to crack open as a sub-zero popsicle. Welcome to the world of the Absolute Zero Mystery genre, where the clues are as elusive as a white cat in a snowstorm and the plots twist and turn more than a roller coaster on steroids. I'm talking edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting, can't-sleep-until-you've-turned-the-last-page kind of mystery books.
Forget predictable plot lines and straight forward detective stories - these books make unraveling a ball of yarn seem like child's play. Every chapter is a mind-bending puzzle piece that you'll spend hours (if not days) trying to fit into the larger, confounding image. What's more, they're so excruciatingly gripping that you'll find it absolutely impossible to put them down without knowing the ending. So, whether you're a die-hard fan of mysterious thrillers or a novice to the genre, this list of top 10 best Absolute Zero Mystery books is a must-read. Unsolvable? Let's find out.
『We Keep the Dead Close』
FINALIST FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE NATIONAL BESTSELLER Named One of The Best Books of 2020 by NPR's Fresh Air * Publishers Weekly * Marie Claire * Redbook * Vogue * Kirkus Reviews * Book Riot * Bustle A Recommended Book by The New York Times * The Washington Post * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus Reviews* Booklist * The Boston Globe * Goodreads * Buzzfeed * Town & Country * Refinery29 * BookRiot * CrimeReads * Glamour * Popsugar * PureWow * Shondaland Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard and an "exhilarating and seductive" (Ariel Levy) narrative of obsession and love for a girl who dreamt of rising among men. You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget. 1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
Author | Becky Cooper |
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Price | $12.99 |
Publisher | Grand Central Publishing |
Release Date | Nov 10, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Seven Wonders of Crime』
A man dies of thirst in an isolated shed with a full carafe of water beside him. Another is stabbed in a pergola surrounded by a sea of mud, but there are no other footprints. People are dying at an alarming rate, people with no apparent connection to one another save for a cryptic painting sent to the police before each murder. That, and the fact that each crime appears to have been impossible to execute. The paintings have a common theme: each contains a coded reference to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Enter Owen Burns, Edwardian dilettante and amateur sleuth, whose assistance is often sought by Scotland Yard to solve baffling crimes. Burns regards murder as an art form and is dazzled by the creativity of the mysterious killer, whose motive and methods are more baffling with each new murder. 'The Seven Wonders of Crime' is the second Burns novel to be published in English on Amazon, following 'The Lord of Misrule' in 2010. The author, best-selling French writer Paul Halter, is widely regarded as the successor to John Dickson Carr. His prize-winning novel 'The Fourth Door, featuring his other series detective Dr. Twist, was published on Amazon earlier in 2011. In all, Paul Halter has written over 30 novels, almost all 'locked room, ' or impossible crime. In 2006 his collection of short stories 'The Night of the Wolf' appeared, to critical acclaim.A fourth full-length novel, 'The Demon of Dartmoor, ' is in preparation. Please contact: pugmire1@yahoo.c
Author | Paul Halter |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Createspace Independent Publishing Platform |
Release Date | Dec 19, 2011 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Good Girls』
On a summer night in 2014, Padma and Lalli went missing from Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh. Hours later they were found hanging in the orchard behind their home. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of their short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: What is the human cost of shame?
Author | Sonia Faleiro |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Grove Press |
Release Date | Feb 09, 2021 |
Source | Google Books |
『I'll Be Gone in the Dark』
THE BASIS FOR THE MAJOR 6-PART HBO® DOCUMENTARY SERIES #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post | Maureen Corrigan, NPR | Paste | Seattle Times | Entertainment Weekly | Esquire | Slate | Buzzfeed | Jezebel | Philadelphia Inquirer | Publishers Weekly | Kirkus Reviews | Library Journal | Bustle Winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Nonfiction | Anthony Award Winner | SCIBA Book Award Winner | Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence The haunting true story of the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California during the 70s and 80s, and of the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case—which was solved in April 2018. The haunting true story of the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California during the 70s and 80s, and of the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case—which was solved in April 2018. Introduction by Gillian Flynn • Afterword by Patton Oswalt “A brilliant genre-buster.... Propulsive, can’t-stop-now reading.” —Stephen King For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area. Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.
Author | Michelle McNamara |
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Price | $15.99 |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Release Date | Feb 26, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Chinese Orange Mystery』
A topsy-turvy crime scene sends a detective on a puzzling quest for the truth. The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence—the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room—is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears—and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl. Enter amateur sleuth Ellery Queen, who arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body, only to be immediately drawn into a complex case in which no clue is too minor or too glaring to warrant careful consideration. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, The Chinese Orange Mystery is revered to this day for its challenging conceit and inventive solution. The book is a “fair-play” mystery in which readers have all the clues needed to solve the crime. In 1981, the novel was selected as one of the top ten locked room mysteries of all time by a panel of mystery-world luminaries that included Julian Symons, Edward D. Hoch, Howard Haycraft, and Otto Penzler.
Author | Ellery Queen/Otto Penzler |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | National Geographic Books |
Release Date | Oct 16, 2018 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Five』
Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril.
Author | Hallie Rubenhold |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Release Date | Jan 01, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『No Place Safe』
In this powerful and compelling memoir, Kim Reid shares the extraordinary story of growing up in the shadow of a serial killer who terrorised Atlanta, murdering 29 black children from 1979-81. Kim's mother was the first female African-American detective assigned to the investigation, and as she became more preoccupied with finding the killer, a 13-year-old Kim felt her life unravelling around her. An unforgettable story of innocence lost, and of a heartbreaking and controversial case that captivated the world.
Author | Kim Reid |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Dafina Books |
Release Date | Jan 01, 2007 |
Source | Google Books |
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Price | unknown |
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Source | Google Books |
『The Gardner Heist』
The true story of one museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld: “Boser cracks the cold case of the art world’s greatest unsolved mystery.” —Vanity Fair Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5 million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth as much as half a billion dollars, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and their theft one of the nation’s most extraordinary unsolved mysteries. Art detective Harold Smith worked the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to pick up where he left off. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith’s unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock ’n’ roll art thief and a golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse. A tale of greed, obsession, and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves. “Captivating.” —The Wall Street Journal “A tantalizing whodunit.” —The Boston Globe
Author | Ulrich Boser |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Harper Collins |
Release Date | Feb 19, 2009 |
Source | Google Books |
『Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder』
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection One of Bustle's "Best True Crime Books of the Year" “[A] juicy page turner . . . capturing both the allure and the perils of the dream factory that promised riches and fame.”—New York Times Book Review The gruesome 1947 murder of hopeful starlet Elizabeth Short holds a permanent place in American lore as one of our most inscrutable true-crime mysteries. In a groundbreaking feat of detection hailed as “extensive” and “convincing” (Bustle), skilled legal sleuth Piu Eatwell cracks the case after seventy years, rescuing Short from tabloid fodder to reveal the woman behind the headlines. Drawing on recently unredacted FBI and LAPD files and exclusive interviews, Black Dahlia, Red Rose is a gripping panorama of noir-tinged 1940s Hollywood and a definitive account of one of the biggest unsolved murders of American legal history.
Author | Piu Eatwell |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Liveright Publishing |
Release Date | Oct 10, 2017 |
Source | Google Books |
So, there you have it, folks! These ten electrifying reads boast some of the cleverest minds, most complex plots, and nerve-wracking suspense you'll find in the whole mystery genre. Whether you're an amateur sleuth in your spare time or just someone who loves a good puzzler, these absolute zero mystery books are guaranteed to keep you awake, nose stuck in the pages, as you grapple with the seemingly unsolvable. Each one is chillingly unique, spinning you 'round in circles before the plot plunges to a depth colder than zero - an icy twist you didn't see coming! So, go on, challenge yourself. See if you can unravel the mystery before the detective does. Just a warning though, you might end up amusingly baffled. These authors play the mystery game at a whole new difficulty level. Get your detective hat on and happy reading!
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