12 Days of Mysteries: Day 7

Welcome back to 12 Days of Mysteries! It's Day 7, and on deck today we have suggestions for two YA mysteries that might be a little . . . incognito. That is, stories that might not be packaged as mysteries, yet they deal with crime or detective work in a way that's appealing to mystery fans.

Mary McCoy suggests OUT OF THE EASY, by Ruta Sepatys. "Some mystery elements and a whole lot of crime in this one, one of my faves of 2013," says Mary.

Until she was 11, Josie Moraine was raised in a Big Easy brothel by a house full of prostitutes - one of them her own mother. Since then, she's more or less raised herself, nurturing a dream of attending Smith College and crafting a plan to escape her city, her past, and her mother's reputation. However, when Josie's mother flees town with her gangster boyfriend on the heels of a murder, Josie finds herself sucked back into the underworld she's trying to escape. Set in 1950s New Orleans, Out of the Easy is a feast of a book: there's mystery, romance, scandal, crime, and a winning heroine who's got book smarts and street smarts to spare.

Diana Renn says, "I recently read  Just One Day,  by Gayle Forman, looking for a diversion from mystery and a tale of adventures abroad. There were adventures abroad, all right -- it's a really compelling story about a girl on a post-graduation tour of Europe, who meets a guy acting in a Shakespeare play and impulsively follows him to France for twenty-four hours. But it's there's also a healthy dose of mystery here. When the guy disappears after their one night together, Allyson spends the next year of her life -- at college and then back in Europe-- trying to find answers to her unresolved questions about those twenty four hours. She also tries to find the guy himself. Allyson turns into an amateur sleuth in her personal missing person case, roping in appealing sidekicks and making friends along the way. And kudos to Forman for making online sleuthing so interesting!"

Allyson Healey's life is exactly like her suitcase—packed, planned, ordered. Then on the last day of her three-week post-graduation European tour, she meets Willem. A free-spirited, roving actor, Willem is everything she’s not, and when he invites her to abandon her plans and come to Paris with him, Allyson says yes. This uncharacteristic decision leads to a day of risk and romance, liberation and intimacy: 24 hours that will transform Allyson’s life. A book about love, heartbreak, travel, identity, and the "accidents” of fate, Just One Day shows us how sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost. . . and how often the people we are seeking are much closer than we know.


Have you ever read a book that wasn't packaged as a mystery, but you secretly suspect that it is? We'd love to hear about it!