7 Mysteries with Dark, Moody Settings

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. What she finds is a terrifying yet oddly seductive mansion, full of mystery. The book is all glamor and decay—gowns and red lipstick and peeling wallpaper.

This gothic mystery only pretends to be about its human characters, Maxim de Winter and his new bride. Really it’s about Manderley, the gorgeous, stately, lush estate haunted by the memories of Maxim’s dead wife and very alive (and creepy) housekeeper.

The dark, dripping woods of the Pacific Northwest provide the perfect atmosphere for this mystery about missing girls, dysfunctional families, and the long life of small town secrets.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies, but this one is unique even for Detroit: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. Set against the backdrop of a broken city trying to put itself back together, you know with Lauren Beukes you’re in for a genre-bending thriller.

No one does the South’s dark underbelly quite like S.A. Cosby. This book has it all: a mysterious death, a gritty small town, even snake handlers. In less skilled hands, it might veer into cliché (or at least a country music song) but luckily we’re in Cosby’s.

Three kids go into the woods, but only one comes out alive. Twenty years later, Detective Rob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox come back to the same woods to investigate the murder of another child. The woods are dark and who knows what’s out there—or inside Rob’s head.

This book is nuts—in the best way possible. Every night at 11pm, Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered in the midst of a party at Blackheath Manor. Every morning, Aiden wakes in the body of a different Blackheath guest to try and solve the murder in a seemingly endless time loop. The plot is riveting and the gloomy, rundown mansion set in the 1920s gives Agatha Christie vibes.