Mysteries with a Mystical Bent

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Sedona, Arizona, with girlfriends, including visits to shops stocked with religious icons, New Age literature and rocks claiming various mystical properties. We also hiked to a famous "vortex" to imbibe its earth energy. Now I must admit that a number of curious things occurred near the vortex; for example, a strange man suddenly appeared on the trail and handed out free heart-shaped pieces of red sandstone to our group of gals before moseying on. Divine Messenger or Loco Local? Choose the most satisfying answer. Now as a rule, I tend to avoid detective fiction that relies on the workings of angels, fairies, witches, vampires, ghosts, psychics or otherwordly powers, animal or mineral, as plot devices in solving mysteries. But I also make exceptions. Here are some popular mysteries with a paranormal bent, starting with favorite author Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, about U.S. Marshals who go to an island asylum to investigate the disappearance of a criminally insane patient. Some detecting powers I'd rather not have. In Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds, Miriam Black can tell with a touch when you're going to die, and the hero of The Cypress House by best-selling author Michael Koryta can sense imminent death. If you like folks who can use magical powers to catch criminals, try prolific author Heather Blake's It Takes a Witch, whose heroine casts spells to grant wishes, with some murderous consequences. If you believe in psychic sleuthing, read any entry in Kay Hooper's series about the FBI Special Crimes Unit's psychic detecting. For ghost lovers, there's Night of the Living Deed by E.J. Copperman, about a haunted guesthouse where the ghosts expect the new owner to solve their murders. And that brings us back to Sedona, and Mathew Marine's Devil's Moon about a troubled FBI agent who gets involved in investigating a Sedona "murder-suicide" after a young woman is found mutilated in a police officer’s basement, his confession scrawled on the wall above his dead body. Sounds like a straightforward who-done-it? Hey, it's set in Sedona, so psychic powers, premonitions, angels and mystical experiences abound. For more paranormal mysteries, check out readers' recommendations at https://www.goodreads.com/genres/paranormal-mystery

'Psychic Detectives' Only Shine in Fiction

A popular mystery subgenre features "psychic detectives," folks who help solve crimes with paranormal skills such as precognition or postcognition (extrasensory perception of future or past), psychometry (psychic info from objects), telepathy (mind reading), and "spirit medium" contact with the dead, including murder victims. These books offer a path to justice that is not blinded by the here and now, reading the secret thoughts of witnesses, culprits and victims, and detecting a crime unlimited by time, space or death itself. Psychic detectives certainly have won a place in popular culture--as seen from TV dramas and "reality" shows, such as NBC's "Medium" and Court TV's "Psychic Detectives," as well as repeated psychic detective appearances on hit talk shows. An example of a successful mystery series built around psychic detectives is Kay Hooper's Bishop/Special Crimes Unit (including her Shadows, Evil, Fear, Blood, and Haven trilogies). Yet, while fascinating to imagine, psychic detecting in real life has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers. Evidence of psychic crime-solving often turns out to have been fed to an uncritical media by the psychics themselves rather than independent sources. The police, FBI, and victim families consistently deny psychics' claimed involvement and helpfulness. Even successful psychic insights tend to use generality, ambiguity and probability to boost the 50/50 success rate of guesswork. Take a prediction that a missing person will be found dead in/near woods/field/water (depending on local landscape), and that someone with a close personal connection is involved. Such a prediction is likely to pan out because a person mysteriously missing for a length of time is usually dead, most people are killed by someone they know, and missing bodies are dumped in out-of-sight places--but that's hardly a revelation to police. Many reports of psychic achievement then benefit from historical reconstruction; vague claims become specific, misfires are ignored or replaced with correct predictions, and fabrications become facts. Nevertheless, the fictional fascination with psychics continues because popular authors offer some fun reads, including writers such as Kay Hooper, Heather Graham, Charlaine Harris and Victoria Laurie. After all, a psychic character and an omniscient author are playing much the same role. For a psychic mystery sampling, see http://www.cozy-mystery.com/blog/super-super-natural-mystery-novels-on-the-cozy-mystery-site-psychics-6th-sense.html

Try Paranormal Mystery Treats for Halloween

Halloween is a perfect time to indulge in mysteries with the extra spice of the supernatural--ghosts, curses, magic, haunted houses and dark forces. I've always had a soft spot for Jonathan Kellerman's best-selling Alex Delaware mysteries set in Los Angeles, so I'll start with The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and his son Jesse. This new contemporary mystery pulls in religious mythology and the supernatural to produce "an extraordinary work of detection, suspense, and supernatural mystery," per Amazon's quote of Stephen King. Solving the mystery of a severed head in an abandoned living room takes burned-out LAPD detective (and rabbi's son) Jacob Lev on an odyssey from Los Angeles to Prague to Oxford and back again. His standard crime-genre investigation is complicated by a mysterious woman and a monstrous being of Jewish mythology (the title's Golem), built to render justice upon the wicked—including serial killers. If your appetite for the spine-tingling is still not sated, read Mateguas Island, a debut novel by Linda Watkins and winner of the gold medal in Amazon's 2014 Readers' Favorite International Book Award Competition for the Supernatural Fiction category. A troubled family comes to a remote island off the coast of Maine, not realizing that their inherited property is steeped in destructive forces. An arcane locked box, a foreboding trail into the woods, a seductive young woman, and tales of a malevolent Native American spirit ratchet up the suspense. Then, for a modern haunted house story, turn to Christopher Fowler, award-winning author of the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. His original thriller Nyctophobia isolates newly married architect Callie in a grand house in southern Spain, a house split between rooms flooded with light and rooms locked away in darkness and neglect. As Callie begins to research the history of the strange house, her nyctophobia (fear of the dark) is awakened, along with haunting secrets. But when it comes to seeing ghosts, hysterical, attention-seeking adolescent girls would seem to be most susceptible. So no wonder the girls at a posh Irish boarding school keep seeing the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder in Tana French's The Secret Place, another installment in the Dublin Murder Squad series. The narrative alternates between flashbacks by clique of schoolgirls and the perspective of a cold-case detective and his partner, who spend a long day and night investigating. As any parent of an adolescent might guess, the private lives of teenage girls, their friendships and betrayals, can be more mysterious and dangerous than the detectives imagine. If psychic sleuths rather than psyched-out sleuths are your cup of tea, then pick up veteran paranormal mystery writer Kay Hooper's Haunted, the latest entry in the Bishop Special Crimes Unit series. For more reviews of paranormal mystery releases, check out http://www.iheartreading.net/genres/paranormal-mystery-mystery-and-suspense-3/