979 Best Mystery Story Ideas and Prompts - Commaful Storytelling Blog

For a mystery story to be considered effective, it needs to have an exciting storyline, fascinating characters, and thrilling puzzles. It should also be written in a way that would want readers to keep turning its pages. Because of all of those elements, it may seem difficult to create a good mystery story, but it is actually not. With the right inspiration and some creativity, you can eventually create your own mind-blowing mystery fiction.

One thing that can keep you inspired are writing prompts. Whether they are a few paragraphs-long, a short phrase, or even just one word, writing prompts can bring out your creativity and provide you many other benefits. For once, it puts you out of your comfort zone and exposes you to new ideas, worlds, and perspectives. It also gives you the opportunity to write about topics that are outside of your preferred niche or genre.

Another benefit of writing prompts is that it also helps you shift your mindset when you are trying to write a story from a genre that you are not used to. For instance, if you specialize in writing detective novels and you have trouble writing caper stories, you can search for prompts that would inspire you to tell a story from the point of view of criminals to get started.

Writing prompts can also shift your focus and help you break through a writer’s block. If you are feeling distracted or uninspired to write your story, you can use a prompt to spice up your plot or change a scene.

Best of all, writing prompts can make you a better writer. By challenging yourself to write stories inspired by prompts regularly, you can enhance your writing style, exercise your imagery, hone your grammar, and improve your narrative.

If you are looking for inspiration for your mystery story, here are writing prompts and ideas you could use to spark your imagination and stir up your creative juices:

You never expected to catch a serial killer on your first day. You were wrong.
Dead bodies are showing up everywhere in Frontera, California with strange eyes.
A billionaire hires you to resolve a locked-room mystery.
You have the gift of seeing ghosts. On this day, you will meet your soulmate, a ghost of yours, who will help you solve a mysterious death.
A secret society known as the squiggle-tigers have been stealing creative geniuses for entertainment. Agents of the society abduct a comic writer with a tag on his leg saying “tag” on it. You end up having a run-in with some in an airport and while you escape, you set different characters loose in the floors around you. How do they react to actions taken by themselves. Do they know they are fictional characters and do they remember their past selves?
You’re a lazy, 24 year-old mystery solver who’s too busy to file a report. So, photos will do.
A serial killer dies but there is doubt if he did it or not. You are hired by his defense attorney to clear his name.
Mothers and daughters have a special extra sense to find each other.
A former detective is investigating the death of a man who was once regarded as a killer. He interview you and ask you what happened on the day he died. You revealed something he didn’t expect. Now he have to ask you the favour to go to court to testify for the murder. The only problem is the person they want to prosecute is yourself.
A mad scientist proclaimed to be dead at the age of 16 is running for president, and winning.
You are a woman who just killed her husband. Your background is going to start to come out and people are going to look on you as those who killed your husband will lie and make your entire life look like a lie.
Years after the horrible slaughter the fact-finding symposium is over. The eyewitness is found dead. To make matters worse a cinema is realizing a film about the disaster- and you are part of the team.
You’re called in to investigate a bar’s mysterious disappearance in little to no time. In the exact spot of the bar’s disappearance, you find etchings reading, “IOU one bar.”
Your boss comes to you with expensive problems. You happen to have an answer to save the company. You feed your answer to the boss that visits each of his employees at their unaddressed home.
A cop that you despise ends up being tasked to the case of kidnapping your loved one. For his first step, the cop contacts you, with the intention of crossing clues with you.
The top archeologist in the country, Jonathan Black, invites you on his dig to Egypt. A mysterious book has been discovered, and the Egyptian Museum has requested help gaining possession of it for the museum.
An author never tells the whole truth. In fact he tells nothing but lies and misdirection in his books. No matter who reads it, nobody can figure out the truth and ending.
You’ve just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The only drug to save you is illegal. You go on an adventure to a foreign country to turn it into medicine.
A young man is arrested for a crime he claims he did not do. The problem is that another member of the family was found dead at the same time.
You are a self-proclaimed rogue private investigator. One day a beautiful woman approaches you for help. You know she’ll rip you off. But you are unsure as to how.
You’ve been hired to investigate a strange detachment of soldier. Their behaviour is unexplainable.
Your partner, a family man, is caught cheating by his wife. But, he said there’s no way that he’s been inappropriate with any of his clients. The resumes of these 3 clients stick in your head but then your partner beats the rap as there’s no physical evidence linking him to any of the victims. Your partner is released but you don’t know if you trust him and if you can bring yourself to work with him. Happy weekend!
A young journalist has been working on a story for 5 years, detailing the activities of criminals in a corporation he used to work for. On his final day at work, in one final scoop, he steals a painting from the corporation and secretes it away. 4 years later, an advertisement for an award nominating the best detective novels brings with it the call that there is a painting missing from the corporation. That painting? Your manuscript.
You messed up on a home invasion case. The client turns out to be a serial killer and his lawyer is trying to kill you.
The detective stops working for the police and wants to open up his own agency, but he needs one quality to become a licensed detective. You come to ask him for a small case – investigation of the murder of your niece – as a chance to show your qualifications. The case gets complicated, and the detective is unable to helplessly watch you solve the case, one murder after another. He gives up.
The orphaned son of a billionaire has a dark secret. If he turns 18 without anyone knowing his secret, he will die.
You have dreamed about this day for 20 years. Standing in front of the mirror you question yourself if you have imagined today’s events too many times over the years?
A psychic approaches you to follow a charming entrepreneur who collects cursed items for his personal museum. Curiosity kills the psychic.
You’ve opened your own business as a detective but aren’t doing any cases because none of your connections are paying you. The day your business is going bankrupt, you get a briefing.
When you were 6 everyone told you to be careful not to get kidnapped. Now you wonder if that wasn’t the best idea ever.
A long time ago, when you were still just a civilian, you saved a girl from drowning. Twenty years later, she finds you. She is blue. She is naked. She died two hours ago. Not only that, she demands you solve her murder.
Raising two sons alone, you have aged unlike anyone your friends know. One day you finally tie down your troublemaker of a husband and in anger you try to kill him. He promptly tells you that he is really an undercover cop who was investigating the disappearance of your sons and the child molester in the neighborhood. All your children have been found safe and sound, but the neighbors will never be free of your distrust.
You have been elected to the Federal Parliment. Parli for the first time you notice a murderer sitting in the opposition journalists bench. But he was never suspected before.
The ‘secret’ twins of a famous seer lives in a grocery store.
A man has been committing acts of unprecedented evil publicly. The news media revere him as a celebrity. Religious authorities have begun to defend him. Law enforcement struggles to understand him, much less bring him to trial. As a writer, what would you like to know about this man? What would you do?
In the last days of his expecting mother, your father tells you that the child she’s carrying is not his and suggests that you get a paternity test. You tell yourself you’re just trying to make him feel better, but you really want to know why he’s saying this.
A new client hires you, who turns out to be the worst person possible for your health, both physically and psychologically.
You are recovered from a car crash only. But you were completely absent from this earth for more than a decade.
You have just opened an office, are not licensed as a private investigator, and are also not qualified. However, you like to think you know more about it than you actually do. You have been given a case, the life of your last serious boyfriend depends upon your solving this case. All you have to go on is information from the wife and a diary that was returned with the body.
On your sixteenth birthday, a giant box falls from the sky. Inside is a smaller one, and inside that, is an envelope with your name.
You grew up as a foster child in various households, and now you’re suddenly summoned back to the orphanage you used to live in to find out that you have inherited an estate from a wealthy relative
A crazed bomber has been making news for several months until recently in which no new bomb sites have shown up. He turns out to be a teacher at your kids’ school.
You are the casualty of a daring robbery. You wake up in the hospital with amnesia. No close family or friends are listed in the hospital records, your cell phone is gone, and your belongings are missing. Most importantly, they still have your wallet holding your money, watch and ID. You have to find out if you were robbed, and who you thought were your friends betrayed you. You may also be unemployed. You have no memories of your past/your former job/hydrology, what do you do now?
You go camping at a remote place. At night you hear a noise gravely injuring you. The local police dismiss it as wild animals despite the evidence.
An old friend who claims to be “reliving” the entire life of Leonardo de Vinci, and through his experiments is now living a Renaissance life such as Leonardo also lived in the 15th century.
Your husband has been missing for a week. And you suddenly find three unopened, old letters addressed to you from him. You open them and are shocked with the messages in the letter.
For 10 years you lived off the grid, until a girl you saved when you were a part of a vigilante group known as the Indigo League reached out to you in search for her long-lost father.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are secretly working to combine their companies and sell it to the most ruthless dictator of modern times. You’re the only one who can stop them.
The serial killer who has been murdering your friends for years. He enjoys his work too much to stop. Yet his one blind spot is that he hates children. You in this story are a morose fifteen year old. You and your friends are the only remaining children in this world where this serial killer reigns supreme.
Your fiancée is a big star at the moment and you had planned to surprise her with an elaborate proposal. During her birthday-party, you show up with all black eyes. You have been beaten up trying to propose, and your speech is difficult to understand.
The last will of your recently deceased friend included a note that goes to you. The note ends up changing your friends’ estranged children — or does it?
180 million dollars is stolen from your company. The CFO was part of the plot. Your CEO was. The company investigates and finds the mastermind behind it be…best friend…the CEO’s wife.
You receive a call from a hospital saying “there’s blood in your daughter’s car” the day after she inquires about a stranger in town. There are two more girls in the hospital in off areas of the city.
A regular guy has his heart broken for the first time ever. He swears vengeance towards the person he was in love with. It turns out that he has the perfect chance
The target of your most recent hit turns out to be an agent, take her on the run, show the world that nobody hunts you because you hunt them first
Your friend, a police officer, dragged you along on a stakeout. An explosion went off. You wake up to see him, and everyone around you dead. There’s a bomb under all the rubble. What do you do?
Your best friend and your lover are secretly related to each other. You are dating your best friend who doesn’t know that.
A detective from a rural country town is trapped inside a noir story running for his life while being pursued by a mysterious criminal mastermind.
A priest who recently molested a youth is dying of AIDS. He reveals god is an alien before he breathes his last. The world is shocked by the revelation. Then someone mentions they would have liked to ask him more questions because he contradicted what he said two weeks before.
Your favourite author comes to P.I. Helper to promote her latest book. She tells you it’s about a genius P.I. who lures people to his house, frames them for theft and kills them.
An innocent man turned convict is on death row. The governor has only one night to decide if a routine execution should take place or not.
A boy meets a girl. She turns out to be some kind of supernatural creature.
Your best friend dies. You were best friends since childhood. In his will even $10,000 is left you for a job you have to do. A job that seems almost impossible.
Two children are convicted of killing their dad. Their sister was with them but the police didn’t catch it on camera. The sister recently admits what happened and makes a plea to the boys’ lawyer and mother to prove them innocent.
The King of San Andreas has been murdered! You can be the main detective for this murder case. You are crafty, wise, brave, and absolutely astonis…
A clone is cloned and both clones want to get to know each other.
An astrologer has predicted you will die tomorrow.
You are floating on a wooden boat lost in a vast ocean. Far in the horizon you can see what look to be tiny biscuits on plates. Calling for help, you fall off your boat and to the water.
The human race is all wiped out due to either nuclear warfare or a mutated virus. Now that the mature survivors are born, they are being tracked down and put to death. The survivors are 15 year old teens and have to live in the wild for years. A boy and a girl of different races find a group of survivors led by an 80 year old along with “kids.”
You skip a dose of a medication that helps mental disorders because you don’t like the side effects. When you wake up the following day you didn’t write a blog post the day before because your disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, causes you to forget all things written.
When your ex left your sight behind, he had your life savings with him. He was reported dead, because he had accidently hit an old man with his car. You suspect that’s a lie and want to prove it through your own detective agency.
You’ve had a very successful year and almost everything you’ve done just happened without your notice. Yet people are starting to talk and wonder what your name is again, starting to breathe life into rumors.
While out hunting a werewolf bites you. Now, if there ever was a full-moon, you yourself turn into a werewolf.
A neighbor you met a year ago comes to you for help. Yet, they reveal details that not a single person would possibly know about. These details push you to research the murder that happened there twenty years ago.
The sheriff asks you to investigate a case. The more he tells you about the case, the more worried you are that he’s guilty.
You live a happy life with your pregnant wife and new born son. You aren’t important and you lead a pretty normal life. All of a sudden, your life is joined by that of the President of the United States, now, they both need your help.
You have died, but have insisted that no one tell anyone that you are dead.
You have been suffering from a deadly disease. Your life is doomed. One morning you wake up and you’re just fine. Cheating death would have been great. It would have been even better if your husband, wife, lover, and best friend thought you were still deathly ill and kept your death a secret. Eventually the truth is revealed and your marriage/relationship collapses amidst the scandal. And when you die years later — it will be in no small part due to psychosomatic guilt and stress involved with cheating death.
You succeed in fulfilling your dream and becoming king/queen of England, France, or Russia. Something goes wrong and you lose your destiny.
A new GMC truck has been circulating around town. It is seen by numerous residents as it drives around parking lots, through alleys, and driving the wrong way on one-way streets. It disappears occasionally only to return hours later to an other random location, driving the same strange way. Finally, the sighting stops but not before 6 women in the town are abducted from the same residential neighborhood. Four hours later, the detective responsible for the case gets a tip.
You awaken disoriented and confused. Everything seems just slightly off. You break your wrist as you try to stand and the world wrenches to the side as if you feel like you stepped off a curb that wasn’t there. To your right there seems to be a miniature world of some kind. Both you and the miniature world have different gravity and so your keys fall to the miniature world but your knife doesn’t.
The most successful serial killer of all time is now looking for you, the only person who has ever escaped. Finding you is his next target.
You have always been the voice of reason – never swayed by emotions, facts speak for themselves. However, when you want to kill another investigator, you realise reason is no longer in your vocabulary. The detective is close to revealing the tragedy behind your relative’s death and it’s only a matter of time before your infallibility is broken.
Benjamin Franklin Flynn was the best policeman the world has ever seen. He recovered everything, from stolen cars and other valuables to kidnapped children. Everybody knew him by name. Everybody loved him.
Two children go missing in your town. A rabbit gives you a lead in finding the children.
You and your wife are banned from playing amateur detective and must stick to home while a murder case is taking place in your home town. Yet you end up participating.
It’s funny how Jesus always seems to appear to you the times when you need him the most. When you’re on your knees and willing to do whatever is necessary to get out of the horrible situation you are shoved into. And yet, no matter what you do, he leaves you high and dry.
You are a kid and fighting against an alien invasion. You know nanotechnology is being used on Earth because you’re downloading into computers. You immediately disconnect the computer from the Net Infrastructure. The computers begins to operate abnormally, and the electric power grid is destroyed by computer control. The people in influential positions are already being controlled and they try to convince the police to detain you, because they were placed under considerable influence.
An employee murders his boss to try and steal their business.
A man without a past is found wandering in the streets with no memory of who he is. He soon learns that the police are after him for serial murder. Problem is, they only have vague hints that,and even these seem to contradict each other.
Your favorite celebrity is being portrayed as a murderer in a major supermarket brand television drama. You are determined not to let that injustice go on.
You just confessed your darkest secrets to a mysterious psychic concerning crimes you haven’t committed yet.
Ethan Cole wakes up in a room with a noose around his neck. Three bullets in his chest and unknown chemicals injected into his body. His head is pounding. He believes he was killed. So, how did he end up in this predicament?
A local tough kid gives you an uptown address and some cash. At this new place, you are to spend the night for no apparent reason. No food, no bathroom, nothing. At midnight, you’re leaving. Else, there might be trouble.
Someone or something starts performing your daily actions, when you’re not there.
While investigating on a homicide, you find yourself strangely attracted to the detective on the case.
Two separate people come to you and each one accuses the other to have kidnapped their daughter. Neither one of them knows for sure if their daughter is still alive. One of them was the one that called the police.
You are the lead detective in the search for a serial killer. However, your life is falling apart, so you close the case out and start blaming yourself for not finding this ‘monster’.
A murderer with a photographic memory escapes from prison and is looking to torture and kill you, for unknown reasons. You must outsmart him if you want to live long enough to see tomorrow.
Someone vandalized your shop, and now you’re being blackmailed.
A detective finds a message on his door that clearly states his death. The detective has never seen anyone around his home. He’s scared out of his mind but doesn’t call the FBI like his friends say to. He decides to find out who left the message first, before finding out why he’s been targeted. He checks it out when he gets off work that night.
You’ve realized at the last minute that you’re forgetting to buy your grand daughter a present for her birthday. You run into a department store but the last of the ones you want are all gone. No one will sell it to you, even on credit. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat …
You were just acquitted after being falsely accused of murdering a 6 year old girl. In your first meeting with your lawyer someone claims to have seen you abduct her.
You are an expert when it comes to fake personal histories. You created one for a rising politician. Now he is the most powerful man on Earth.
17.3 million bricks above ground are distracting from the billion or so ones underneath. The same person who got you this job also planned the great watershed robbery.
An obsessed poet follows the trail of the characters from his favorite books. The trail leads him slowly closer to the thinking of one of the characters. When he meets him the only way left to find out – is to think like him, or die.
You’re riding your bike home from the supermarket when you find a dead man sprawled in the middle of the road.
Take the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band and change all but two of the details.
The diary you gave your father as a child has been returned to you. But it was never delivered. The diary is still sealed. It has no entries. It has no bookmark. It is the wrap of the diary.
A man comes to you with a video. The video shows all the evidence you’d need to clear him of murder. He doesn’t have the video though. YOU have the file.
A fireman visits you with information about a mysterious triple murder case. The cases happen to be the ones that he believes you may solve when he sees your deductible going up on your health insurance on a high resolution monitor. It doesn’t help that the daughter of the one of the victims 00 is the detective on the case who he is sending your info to.
There’s an urban legend that a man lived to be 150 years old. In the present day, a cop reports finding a man age 150 still alive, but no one can find this man again.
You and your ex went on a trip to the.. forest, that’s all you can remember. Things just aren’t making sense since you woke up from your nightmare.
A group of hunters have found a hidden portal to another dimension. The beast of the other dimension carries a strange disease that kills anyone who strikes a deal with the beast. A werewolf hunter learns about the offer and travels to the other dimension to try to save his comrades but possibly also hunt down the infected tree to prevent the spread to the real world.
You’re a private eye, down on your luck. When your former partner, Willy, asks you to be his ride to the fair, you don’t think much of it. However, the more you go to the fair, the more you realize it’s not what it seems.
Two mobsters have kidnapped your wife and child. Your only contact with them is the telephone.
A family photo is clearly altered. The characters in all family photos look as if they’ve aged over the last 20 years. But they haven’t.
All those steel buckets, what for?
An omega decker with the instincts of a wolf tracks a jacker through the cyber matrix. Except, he’s not so much of a loner.
The detective is a brilliant young woman that is in an accident where she doesn’t remember who she is or anything else. She looses her case on people that she holds responsible for it.
An old colleague contacts you with a case to clear his name. He has been accused of a triple homicide, and he could really use your help. You find that he has in fact been framed for the murders, and that there is more to this case than what even the police have concluded.
You wake up with an injury. You know for a fact no one was near you. What happened?
Suddenly everyone in town is dead, except for you.
A voodoo queen raised and “adopted” you when you were just a baby. Now she’s dying and wants to meet you for the first time before she dies. You must say yes.
A new job, a new career … the duties … kill, maim, hurt others then disappear back into the general workforce of society. You actually enjoy your new job for awhile …
Some drug cartel thugs come after your wife and daughter because they feel you are an enemy of the cartel. You feel like you have to protect them and figure out why they are being targeted in the first place.
You visit your father who has been in a psychiatric clinic since you were 12. During your visit he tells you the story of the time before you were born in which your mother was murdered.
A missing history professor who also taught at your university contacts you by email and tells you that he has discovered proof of a historical conspiracy. He will reveal it to the press at noon tomorrow by e-mailing it to a news magazine. He then ceases communication. You need to get the email before then to prevent him from ruining both his and your life.
A group of teens who probably played D&D and read Lord of the Rings in pubescence, are traveling across Europe with the intention of summoning a demon. They pick the wrong incantation, and unintentionally summon Satan himself.
A lawyer asks you to find his brother who hasn’t been heard from in more than ten years. It turns out that he was caught up in mysterious events in your town and never made to prison for it.
Just as you are about to kill a man and collect the bounty on him, you discover that he has twins that nobody told you about. Now, you’re being hunted as a result.
When you were still very young your daughter died from an illness. Nearly 30 years later her body is found buried in the backyard.
A serial killer always holds onto the eyeballs of the last person he/she killed before the next one. The murderer surrenders to the police, forcing the police to figure out the actual killer.
Your wife ran you over a few weeks ago. Suddenly, you wake up from a coma. There seems to be a protective force field around you. The real question is whether this is divine or demonic. And whether your wife was really responsible for the hit-and-run.
You take a run to be alone, to wander, when you stumble upon a dead body. An hour after the body was found, the police have no suspect, motive, or any indication why the murder was committed.
A woman that owns a bar is only the bartender, but she has a secret that she can render people unconscious just by talking to them.
The prime suspect in a murder case is found with the burnt remains.
A large man walks up to you and hands you a seemingly blank piece of paper to write a five-or-six-word story on.
The high school band’s trumpet player is murdered and you are asked by the lead detective to look at the scene as your prolific knowledge of crime scenes has earned great renown.
It’s 1881 and you’ve just been hired to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Rumors say you might even be Jack the Ripper.
You’ve inherited a ranch deep in the woods. What you didn’t know is that the previous owner was a serial killer.
As your father is dying of an illness, one of his greatest secret’s is revealed to you.
Your partner is killed chasing your last lead. You are determined to find the murderer and clear your partner’s name. This leads into a case of corruption involving aliens, a secret society, and police homicide procedure.
Senator Walczak has a plan to win the presidential election by making everyone vote at least 5 times each. His enemies are closing in to stop him and you have found yourself smack in the middle.
A snake comes in through the open window and threatens to kill your partner. Then the apocalypse breaks loose and you have to save anything that is left of your life, your partner, your apartment, and you client, who turns out not to be human.
A jealous colleague attempts to murder you during your investigations. First, they hire a team of murderers, who ends up killed by one of the killers they hired. Then they try to poison you in hospital visiting your dying mother. Finally save yourself by putting sleeping pills in peanuts and constantly examining the tea you make.
The victim’s body in the murder you’re investigating is identified as belonging to an Elvis look-alike who disappeared years ago. The only thing is, Elvis is supposed to be dead. Is this really his murder or the latest in a string of Elvisimposing serial killers?
A man has had his memory erased and he pays you to help him remember. You go through a carefully orchestrated first conversation.
You can trust no one.
A serial killer escapes prison, but keeps killing but hasn’t been caught. Many think he may actually be an Angel but no one can prove it. Could it be true? Or is it something else?
A detective is hired to look into the exhumation of a murder victim thought to be buried alive and then returns to work weeks later claiming not to remember what happened during the time he was supposed to be at the exhumation.
A woman hires you for a standard missing boyfriend/husband case. When you arrive to meet her at her office, she is murdered in front of you.
Love is often simple and straightforward, especially when we’re in love for the first time. However, what if in the end, love isn’t love? What if it’s energy transfer? Now what if the source to receive that energy is fear? Someone truly loves you. Can you survive when she or he was gone?
You and your wife receive an invitation to a posh event that you can’t resist. A friendly non-profit is planning an evening party that is worth millions in donations to the charity. Why you?
You’ve spent 16 years in a desert prison for a crime you didn’t commit. The warden has finally confessed and asked you to come back to clear his name.
Pick something from your local newspaper and write it in the form of a short story.
A CEO requests of you his daughter’s murder. Will you be sympathetic? Who is the CEO and what will you do?
A business partner of yours commits suicide. The suicide note points to you. You walk on air just to find out that there are no restrictions that can prevent death. There are only criminals that can be killed.
You scream out in fear when you wake up to see a strange and frightening figure standing over your bed. Refuse, he whispers, and you die. So you’re locked in your house, and you shout out prayers for deliverance as this demonic figure stalks you and afflicts you with brutal injuries as you resist.
You are a young woman living alone in an old house your grandfather left you. One night you wake up to hear foot steps downstairs. They’re coming to get you, they whisper.
A bullied kid grows up to be a successful man of business. Yet, soon after he makes it big, he ridicules a rival and has him torn to death by a ladder of poisonous snakes.
When you take a documentary film crew home with you they find out your husband is a violent wife beater. Your crew calls the cops, but they arrest you. The next day on the news it is seen that you have murdered your husband and babies.
You wake up in a motel room bed, with a dead man next you and a pistol in your hand. You are – of the Approx. 12% of all male adults who suffer from this affliction – a chocoholic. You are under suspicion of murdering your wife and her lover with the bullet in your gun.
Your train ride home turns creepy. Why?
From your telepathic cat.
The same day of your wedding anniversary you get kidnapped. You claim to have no idea why could that be.
A letter from a convicted serial killer arrives, detailing how you have seven days to live.
Your police sergeant has been working on a case that has stumped her for years because it happened on a recurrent night. The night she was conceived.
The private investigator is always the smartest person in the story. But their cases are harder than anyone expects.
A world where your memories, personality and skills are all based on your profession. You may be the bad guy if your skills or character is based in theft or killing. Your weapon determines your fighting style and abilities.
Your neighbors were a little strange and you always thought your wife talked too much to them. Now your wife has mysteriously disappeared and your neighbors are no help.
Your local police station is closing down and you have a small part in catching the serial killer who murdered the boss’s daughter, five years prior.
After 20 years you stumble upon the bones of a man in the garden your parents left you when they left. They disappear.
You, the protagonist, wake up in public with no idea who you are and you’re in the middle of being asked to kill someone.
A novel that uncovers the mystery of Sherlock Holmes’ disappearance
You are given no choice but to marry the most eligible bachelor in the whole state. But, you have a big secret to hide.
Someone blackmailing you or threatening your life? No need to worry. The culprit just left you a note explaining what they are doing and why. They even left you options on how to handle the situation. Take note, though, if you decide to do nothing, it wont just go away.
You are a detective & one day you get a promotional offer by your Commissioner to look into a case before the commissioner who’s commissioner-elect reasons that she’s going to need the unbiased, unbribed-by-these-politicos, non-cop perspective you bring. You’ve always believed in the corrupt politics that ruin cases by always letting guilty people off the hook in order to show public sympathy but you find yourself with your hands tied to some extent by the truth. The case is the motor vehicle accident death of your boyfriend’s son and everyone thinks your unfeeling, unloving boyfriend should accept the outcome and not expect justice. You expected a simple, fast-tracked investigation was what was needed for political purposes. Now, you find yourself disallowing the obviously guilty in a town ruled by corruption & necessity for sympathy.
A detective gets diagnosed with cancer. He then runs around quickly, investigating cases, trying to solve his own, his past, his children’s and his parents’.
A pack of aliens discover anal probes to be the most effective way to torture humans.
Leaving some people to die while saving others. You know the reason, you just can’t prove it, and rational people doubt it.
The notorious 30th street killer strikes near your home, and you notice something unusual about the tape used to wrap the bodies.
A forensic specialist works on the case of a murdered child of the Duke of Ashbourne, and finds out something odd.
You become an amnesiac, wandering through the desert until discovered by a hermit who nurses you back to health. You write a report, but can’t remember any of it. You zoom to the top of your profession, but must gut it out after those around you discover the truth about your case. Only your knowing what happened prior would be enough to salvage your professional reputation, your life.
You’ve said a lot of things that you wish didn’t come true. 99% of them have had no bearing towards your life. This 1% is going to change your life forever.
You are running for President and feel a lump in your belly. If you win this election, you will have to keep this fact about yourself a secret for the rest of your life.
That old riddle you never cared for is now your bread and butter. You are paid nice sums of money for figuring out these riddles. However, when presented with a new riddle you freak out and go on the run.
The body wrapped in a thin white sheet looks exactly like the old friend you visited yesterday.
A disgraced ex famous detective writes a book on his career and then mysteriously disappears without a trace.
You’re an Uneducated Private Eye–you know how to shoot and have a rough idea of the law, but you can’t spell and barely graduated high school. You and your partner foil a bank robbery and the criminal, a PhD in English reveals the heist depended on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger .
You are working at a traveling circus and your job is to pickpocket each visitor.
Newspapers open up about one missing person case and it is your own son. You hire private detective forces and try to find him.
A centuries old vampire hunter suddenly realises to her horror that the vampires they hunted centuries ago might have ‘found a way’.
Your brother calls you, saying the recurring moth dream he had for years is actually a memory. The dream is a memory from your brother’s point of view of you getting abducted the night of your high school prom. Your brother is calling you to find the truth on the night you disappeared.
You find a mysterious phone on your private investigator’s desk. It doesn’t belong to anybody, and answers to its own ringtone. You pick it up and start discovering.
A PI has hired you to watch his foundation. No questions asked. He hasn’t been honest about that.
You used to be the most popular guy in high-school. Hit rock bottom. 15 years later you make a plan to get the girl you’ve always wanted and win so called school popularity contest by solving cases. A teacher of yours used to be disliked. Just like you. He gets accused in the murder. You are called to solve it. You’ll be loved again forever if you solve it.
While showing your boss around Africa, you get caught up in the early beginnings of an alien invasion.
You are Jim Morse, an inventor and entrepreneur who just came up with a life changing cure for cancer. This better be it.
A credible witness tells you he saw the murder. He seems sane, rational, not babbling like the insane people that witness murders usually are, until suddenly … you realize you’re alone in the room with him.
You have been told countless times “You remind me of your father”. You’re tired of hearing it. You decide to visit him for answers.
Your husband, the town’s police chief, has disappeared.
The story is told from the POV of a dying person who is hiding a dark secret from their past. However, instead of aiding the detectives in the investigation, they inadvertently worsen the case.
You are an English teacher, that is until one of your students tells you they want to kill their english teacher. You go to the principals about it, only to find it is your wife.
You, your wife, and your child happily go to a fair and then you suddenly heard a high pitched scream coming from the restrooms. You find your son-wife inside the bathroom, murdered and raped. You are given the responsibility of solving the murder of your son-wife by the police. You don’t have to investigate, but just find the murderer.
You are the legal guardian of your brother’s three daughters. During the night your brother murders your wife in cold blood. The girls heard the shooting and art traumatized and scared to work with the police. Since no one saw what truly happened, the police deem it to be a murder-suicide and close the case. On the first night you are left to babysit the trio all alone in the house. Alone in a house with your brother’s dead body and three girls whom you fear know the truth. What are you to do?
A worldly 1930s private detective goes to Thailand in order to escape his debts, gambling debts to Manchester’s most powerful mobster, the Great Boss. The detective is soon hunted by this mobster, hunted to kill him, chased by the casino’s henchmen.
Playing a board game in his spare time leads a man to a hidden society there rules.
You’ve just lost your business after clients stop coming. People have a money-based cult, the Church of Nocebo, that is infecting people to put your business into bankruptcy.
You’re a struggling paranoid schizophrenic who lives alone after your wife died and teenage daughter ran away. Everyone says you’re crazy. The voice in your head isn’t helping.
The one thing I liked about this prompt was how it got people to really dig deep mentally, and see what would pop out. There was tons of answers, and most of them had great potential of being published. Now for my part in the post, which is not as much writing mystery stories, more so talking about them.
An intriguing message arrives.
The detective died of a broken neck. That was the only sure way to tell. It was impossible to tell if she broke her own neck or if someone broke it for her.
You are in a contest to see who can remain in a sealed off hotel room the longest. Also in the room is a weapon hidden somewhere. You are not alone in the room.
You just inherited a mansion. Everything seems fine until you find 200 skeletons in the basement.
You and your wife have an argument over a man she slept with once ten years ago. An hour later she’s dead. Dead at your hands and your alibi has some loopholes.
It’s the year 2050. A rich businessman wants to set up a casino on Venus. He offers you a huge amount of money to go up there and find where he can build the best one.
While home you notice a jewel thief breaking into your neighbor’s house on the opposite side. You call the police on the thief but they claim there’s no crime and no thief so your calling didn’t even merit a come over. Your wife is convinced so you believe yourself to be unwitting in a break-in.
After getting shot in the hip, your detective character is told that if he doesn’t stay in bed for three weeks, the nerve damage could be permanent. What do you do?
You are heading out for Christmas, then hit a deer. You discover a bundle of wrapped gifts in the deer’s womb.
When you answer a help wanted ad for a PI, you never suspect it would be for you. For you would end up investigating the PI. Not to mention you fell for him.
Your lover wants you to help someone write an autobiography. You discover the autobiography is about all your partner’s previous crimes.
You were able to apparently catch the toughest criminal on the planet and tie them up. What do you do with them now?
Someone hires you to check a circle box with four integers inside it that is to be your last job as a private investigator. You find out those integers are, from left to right, 01001101 01010001 01000001 01000010.
A private detective tries to get away from the business. Yet, another case shows up and he can’t resist investigating.
A man wanting to murder his business partner hires you. You are supposed to kill him. Guess who dies?
A mysterious woman finds a man about to jump off a building and pulls him aside. They quickly become lovers.
During your search for your missing friend you discover a drug that will bring back the dead.
Cloning is made legal by a judge, who changes his mind later over the course of the book due to unforeseen circumstances.
You know who murdered Rachel. It was Ted. And you know where Rachel’s body is. You need to figure out Ted’s alibi to learn his motive. It’s hard when Ted’s only been your friend for 47 years.
Something alien is behind the murder of your parents when you were ten.
You are cheating on your wife. Your wife wanted an open relationship. Your lover is her sister. When your wife finds out, she hires you to spy on the sister, the great detective.
A man finds a maze in his garden, without a start or an end.
The people that took your daughter 20 years ago will never come after her. The penalty for another offense is death and they are to stick to the deal. Yet, they do. The people who took your daughter are dropped into your neighborhood. You will have to bring your daughter back to them. Oh, and you still have to have her back so the neighborhood isn’t destroyed.
Everyone actually thinks you’re dead. You are practically a ghost, just without the supernatural ability or the boo-ya.
You get a call from your daughter who has been missing for the last 5 years. You have to track her down without revealing your identity.
A recent failed presidential candidate decides to move into an out of the way private island, far away from the media. Shortly after, murders start popping up island-side.
The police force are reopening the case into past crimes by your grandfather because they suspect you of the killings.
2 murders occur exactly on the opposite sides of the world, but across the same time. There is no apparent reason why.
You are a criminal completing a 17 year jail sentence when a detective desperately asks you to help him catch a serial killer before he strikes again. You get one week to help catch him. What can you do? A disgraced police officer is given his job and his gun back by the commissioner on one condition. Defeat the megamurderer. He has until Sunday. How did he get away with his crimes?
You are a comic book artist with erratic hours. Today, you don’t have a story idea and so you can accept a one-time only hit to make some money.
We live in a digital world. Yet, sometimes we miss an instant message. Well, your phone is busy.
Your colleague is murdered in front of you – a message?
The girl you loved/loved you is now a fugitive wanted for 6 murders and you’re her contact. She slowly poisons you with her cooking so you have to find a way to escape and stay alive.
You just found out you have only six weeks to live. Who killed you, and why?
When was the last time you slept well? You suddenly realize you haven’t slept well in three months, ever since your brother went into a coma. As you try to solve the case a friend of yours tells a story about a serial killer. One killer told him he once slept in a room infested with bats and he could almost hear them whisper “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die.”
A high-school teacher pretends to be a serial killer on the internet. When the girls ask questions, he offs the questioning students. Had the teachers gone missing there was a good chance he would have gotten away with it.
A serial killer chooses his victims a month in advance. You have been investigating the killings and learn how the next murder will be committed.
After skipping between colleges for undergrad and then law school, your dream to become an attorney comes true.
Dismissed after 10 years on Death Row, you wake up in a small box that you can’t remember.
Murderer and victim are locked in the same prison cell. They are both innocent.
I lost myself in Crowdsourcing, a decade into the future.
There are 40 rooms in the last hotel on earth. The guests span the history of humankind. Some of them did something horrible, because of which the hotel needs to be closed.
You get hired by an old retired man. During the investigation, you discover a hidden secret in his past that shakes your conscience.
Your check for a repair of your refrigerator bounces. You look for what broke, and during a struggle you end up murdering the repairman but luckily his people don’t press any charges. They just take him away.
An insurance company is suing you for damages. You aren’t the culprit though and start working with the attorneys to reveal the one who submitted the claim.
An ex-girlfriend asks you to follow her current boyfriend in order to gather evidence of his infidelity. When you decide to take on the case, you realize you are being catfished.
The cop is onto a criminal. He is confident and decisive. The serial killer is afraid. Though there is no apparent way the criminal can detect the cop’s identity. His mind just tells him the cop should be scared. The cop is. It is true that fear can read minds. The cop is right.
Your daughter is adopted. When she’s 21 and about to get married, she finds out she’s your sister and not your daughter.
After a decade, a presumed dead father resurfaces. Rumor has it he’s living in another city. Love conquers all, your burning desire to reunite with him takes over.
Do you agree with them? Are they really that good or is something else making it look like that?
Somebody has been feeding people to sharks. Famous divers suddenly find themselves prone to deadly shark attacks. You’ve been hired to investigate the reason behind it.
You’ve been leading a lonely life for some time, until a freak accident grants you the power to perform miracles. All the sudden your boring life became interesting.
Your dog once helped the police solve a case but you’re stuck in middle-management. The new head of the crime department is transferred in from the same college you studied at 7 years ago. It turns out they were in the same degree program, yet none of you ever met. It’s weird.
You find the most interesting and unusual crossword puzzle in your local newspaper. Or at least you would have, if you know the answer. Which of course you don’t.
You have not seen your wife/husband/lover in 10 years. Now, amidst all this chaos and confusion, that person resurfaces. Only, things are different now.
Two people from completely opposing sides of a conflict in a story fall in love.
You are thrown into the past and realize the people you thought were your parents are not. However, instead of giving you answers you are dropped back into the future with no memory of the past.
Your brother invites you to his boss’s funeral. At least that’s what he says it is.
Missing during a hiking trip with friends, your friend’s body isn’t any of the recovered ones but DNA doesn’t match his.
A friend asks you to help prove his innocence with an alibi. He managed to video the crime scene, but he has already destroyed the camera, and now the cops are searching for him to arrest him.
After a huge scandal ripped apart a side of baseball your father vanishes. You know what happened but no one believes you.
After twenty years, a murder from the past comes back in form of a person claiming to be your long dead son.
An atomic bomb is detected in your city. You got 10 hours to evacuate the city.
A high-impact crime drama about a group of ex-special forces men-turned-vigilantes who save people from slumlords, drug lords and child traffickers.
Let me know if you would like a longer, crazier prompt.
A suicide prompts your investigation into the life of the deceased. Turns out the deceased wanted you to do so.
It is illegal to get rich. So, you borrow a nice young woman’s face and body and set a record for becoming the richest man on Earth. The next morning you never wake up. Why?
You’re a naive teenager like any other, until you stumble on a big conspiracy while browsing the internet.
You wake up in a hotel room not knowing how you got there or how you got the gash on your arm. You have to piece together this new information and solve the mystery over the course of 24 hours.
As a child you dreamed you time travelled to the future only to discover the world was much darker than anyone could have imagined.
You suggest your new client ask her husband to talk to you directly. She leaves in a hurry. It is the first time you’ve ever seen your client scared.
You have failed a lie detector test. You cannot explain as you are sure you told the truth.
A castaway on an island finds a boat. Who? What? Where? When? Why? Does this relate to the castaway?
You wake up to someone asking you who you are and what year it is. You have no ideas. You find your clothes and ID in the closet do you go to the door, near the door, or freeze? You never know what side of an argument you are on.
At the D.A.’s office you learn, after delivering a witness for court, that the only witness was the murderer.
Your business as a private investigator is booming and you get a job you really don’t like to do. Find someone’s lost cat.
A repaired time machine has been found with a video recording showing your future self reaching the end of his life. Yet, another one turns up in the local junkyard. You decide to use them both and go forward fifty years to test the prediction and see if time could really be that cruel to you.
The last known place of a serial killer is identified and it is your home!
On your 56th birthday you get a phone call from a woman you haven’t heard from or seen in almost 30 years. She offers to meet you for lunch, and when you meet …
You wake up one day, sans memory of your previous life. Oh, you remember all sorts of other things, like how to swim, how to shoot a gun, how to sing, but all memories of your former self have been taken from you.
You get hired to follow someone who you turn out to already know by sight. This person turns out to be your best friend.
You’ve been investigating a crack team of hitmen for a famous client for about a year. One of the hitmen is actually a spy posing as a hitman, and the government that hired you to uncover them was actually their manager.
Your mentor, the best detective in the world, has committed suicide… and you have to find out why.
You’re a regular at this bar. Your love interest, however, is a bar tender. Their boss gets shot and there’s extra police in the bar area. You ran after the killer. You discover the killer is your love interest. You also learn your love interest is a wet – ie, they have supernatural powers against water. You overcome this handicap and arrest them.
You become mysteriously pregnant with the age changing ability. Relive all your life’s memories from a different age. Where do you end up? Will you ever see your daughter, mother or lover again?
You have been killing successfully for years hiding the corpses so well that nobody knows you are the killer. One day your best friend calls you and tells you that he found the corpses in the middle of the woods and he is about to tell the police.
Your husband has taught you to fight dirty and blow off suspicion from your murder. You get caught and put in jail and several other inmates testify against you, not to prosecute, just to look cool in front camera.
You wake up after being in a coma for ll your life to find your set bedside in a hospital. Its only you.
Someone has stolen your perfect dog and left a forgery in its place.
For the prompt list ideas in my alphabet salad posts, you can click here and here
Your partner was investigating what appeared to be a kidnapping case. She was found brutally murdered in her apartment. You are now the prime suspect. You must find out who it really is. The police refuse to listen to you. You have to use other means to find the truth.
A psychopath hunts children, but you aren’t sure which one it is until it’s too late.
A man records his last testament right before committing a murder. His voice is heard many times, sometimes talking to himself, sometimes talking to other people. This case, if solved, might bring you a lot of fame and media coverage right away, as the rich business man, who was killed, was very popular.
A pharmaceutical company has been running a secret laboratory testing a virus. The virus is so powerful that population will crash in two weeks. So company president commits suicide by shooting himself on live television. Now his daughter finds you…
Imran solved many mysteries cases that his parents started when he was a child. Imran’s life why he could never open up to his parents.
You are caught stealing something from a bank with an airtight robbery. The cops catch the robber, but you go free. No one knows you were there.
The FBI wants to recruit you as a consultant. You can’t work with the FBI, but you do want to catch a serial killer that turns out to be a fellow consultant.
You are a private investigator. You are tracking down a hitman to investigate if it is really your father who is killing randomly targets all around New York.
The detective was close to catching the serial killer, but the murderer seemingly commits suicide with a gun next to his hand.
Gathering friends to play mystery scenario based games can be a way to build rapport and network within a group of friends. It can also be an easy way to get involved in collaborative art projects even if the participants typically are not artistic. Everyone can contribute ideas to the game as it develops, keeping the flow of ideas open and fresh.
All 5000 habitable planets in the galaxy are set to self-destruct from a galactic virus.
A washed out private investigator takes one last job, a boy managed to sneak out of his house after being put to bed. The parents tear the house to pieces looking for that kid without success. No one hears a thing except for the cat going a little crazy. And the P.I. herself who hears not one, but two things.
The last cop finally found you. He says this is personal.
An alligator takes an unexpected turn from its species expected diet and starts eating people.
Someone has started killing your buddies. Funeral after funeral…
Your neighbor invites you to his housewarming party and his brother turns out to be a freelance detective who asks you to help him solve his most vexing mystery. He won a bet that he could not get private investigator’s license and worked his way up from a PI criminal caseworker. He can’t stand prying strangers, and he desperately needs you to distract snoopers while he investigates an infrastructure company who used weird technologies in the robbery of a bank. The company’s worked with criminal groups who more and more successfully hit with their own specialists in almost impossible to discover thefts. He needs your crime scene examination experience to find out what technology the company is using and connected to what crime groups.
A detective breaks into a house to question a potential suspect. To her surprise, she’s attacked. This was a bad idea.
Two hit men walk into a bar and 3 minutes later one’s not dead anymore.
You can’t sleep at night. Not only because you have a lot to worry about, but also because everyone around you has died by murdering themselves in their sleep. How do you die in your sleep? You slip a hammock over you and tie it off, so you die of apparent asphyxiation.
A detective is following a trail of clues that leads to the local business men she suspected for 10 years. She comes back and tells you that she thinks that your business partner, a man you trusted with your life, was the mastermind. She has proof.
It’s early mornings and you’re walking your dog down an abandoned neighborhood when you stumble upon a body that’s been oddly left on the street.
Someone privileged and smart is trapped above the Arctic Circle and must do something he/she never wanted to do to survive.
You are part of a club where members receive strange packages once a month. This club is full of the richest and most powerful individuals of the world and all are promised to keep their involvement in the club a secret.
You come to be the guardian of a young teenager who has seen the same killer as you have.
The most disgusting case you ever get. Well it was until yesterday…
A famous author wants you to search for an overly honest critic who gave a one star review to his last book. He promises to double your payment if you can find the critic.
You stay in a haunted bed and breakfast with your failed actor husband only to find you are the next target of the haunting.
Someone has beaten you to a planned murder, if you can’t solve the case, this person will be put away for life.
You find the dead body of your former boss. You decide to cover it up.
You interview a crazy person. He goes crazy enough to kill you.
She wakes up surrounded by corpses. They were the people who wanted to take her life. She also finds an injured man with a gun in hand next to her. He was the one who saved her life.
You always respect the ghosts and goblins, but it’s hard to respect a ghost a ghoul.
A priest goes missing in a priest-infested country. Your job is to find all the facts behind his life.
While looking into a serial murder case you find your wife is the next target. To make matter even worse, the suspect seems to be you.
Dying after being poisoned doesn’t mean you’re dead. Poison is your drug, and now you need more of it.
When you were 12, an alien came to your school offering miraculous energy powers to 5 people. You were the last to make it to the top of the tower alive. The aliens took your friends’ powers away. You can’t allow them to take yours, or you might be the last one standing.
Why Should You Read Mysteries?
A young person opens your mail as you hold a letter opener to send it. You figure it is one of your clients seeking advice. You hand the young person the mail and walk away. Later, you find out it wasn’t a client after all.
A clue leads you to believe your daughter is still alive.
You’re a terrible PI. To make matters worse you’ve taken on your own wife as a client.
You are half witch and half witch hunters are after you.
you get a call from a mother saying she hasn’t seen her child in over 8 months. You trace the call and go to her house to find…
While investigating an elderly man who was depressed he jumped to his death. The only witnesses were 2 parrots in the room. Neither could be found after the investigation.
You lost everything. Your fortune, your career, everything. You think all is well until a late night booty call reveals your wife’s best friend’s husband is your… Have a nice Christmas.
As the sole survivor of a serial killer who is still active you have to solve your own case.
You go to a former lover’s anniversary party, only to find her dead in a most unusual way, the next morning. Later you find out that everyone at the party died in an unusual and gruesome way except for you.
Being popular with the ladies never seemed like a good thing. Until you meet Sara, the woman no one can forget, even after they see her. How did she do it, and can you trust her?
A diabolic serial killer has abducted 12 girls from around the world, including your daughter, and has decided to reveal them to one of them every day in a Facebook feed.
You are a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnosis and you get a contact from a famous hypnotist to see to his patient who has been lying in a coma for 8 years. Your task is to break the hypnosis and find out the man’s lost last words.
A new virus is picked up by pilot of a commercial airliner. As she falls ill in flight, the plane is forced to land in the countryside. As you go to town to investigate, you encounter a conspiracy.
‘My Girls Drink Milk’ is a brony drinking game where each time a pony says the line, you do a shot. What will happen when Pinkie Pie starts breathing fire, Rainbow Dash belching bread rolls, Fluttershy drinking gasoline, Applejack pooping applesauce, and Rarity starts cussing like a sailor?
You wake up at home and you find your family all dead in the dining room table. All your friends and relatives vanish. You have a feeling someone’s trying to drive you crazy.
Your wife is kidnapped by a team of russian ninja spies. You have less than an hour before they call you and tell you if your wife is alive or dead. Every time you waste time calling the police or trying to figure out where she was taken, the kidnappers move her. To save her you must get there before someone finds you.
You are an arms dealer. The threat of war is in the wind. Your client is the son of a president.
The TV psychic on your favorite show has essentially announced who kills who every week. However, this week he says someone from his own group of friends will be the next victim. This is not good news.
5 people are shot dead in full view of a live tv audience. All evidence points to a certain woman. You’ve got ₹50,000/- sitting on you to prove her innocence.
You’ve always dreamed of seeing the most powerful wizard in the world in person. You plan to find one to meet.
A former special forces soldier runs a private detective business. He initially refuses to take a case, but then the detective agency gets the request from a terrorist cell. What happens next will give you chills.
Your dearest friend has asked you to hold his notebook while he is in the shower. When he comes back he appears to not remember you. He doesn’t know who you are.
The police is not able to find the persons who blew up a building. On your search you find that the building had dug tunnels under the whole block and was turning into a bunker.
The first day didn’t start well. Actually, it was the worst day in your life. Things kept getting better from there.
You sit down at the local diner, the only customer at four in the afternoon, and your life changes.
You get a call on Saturday night to investigate a kidnapping that happened 2 days earlier.
Tag, your close friend, is accused of a homicide. Police found the gun at his home. Now, he wants your find out the truth behind the crime.
An artist is commissioned to paint a portrait of a controversial politician. Through his investigation, the artist tries to discover the politician’s one secret.
Take custody of a priceless piece of Dogs Playing Poker. The teens that broke in to rob a local gallery run into these four dogs who happen to be playing poker. No one can tell that the dogs are better than human poker players, but after the robbery, the dogs leave behind a small statue as an apology. Only you know that it is worth millions — more than you’ll ever be paid for the case you’ve got to solve.
You’re an aspiring writer desperate for your next story. You sneaked into the house of a famous mystery author and finds a detective novel manuscript in his desk. That is something that takes you by surprise. Maybe his mind has started to go. Maybe something else entirely. Now, if you sell his work as your own, you get rich and famous. You realize you can use the story in your own debut novel.
An IRS agent is supposed to visit your company to check daily reports. But when she arrives, she ends up dead with a nametag on her that says “Jane Doe”.
The maid who the police takes into custody for murder is crazy in the membrane.
Every evening after school the son of a rich and prominent family falls victim to two attackers. The young boys don’t talk about themselves and do what they do with surgical precision. The police has no leads. No one suspects that the boys used to be orphans. They realize that their personalities have changed by the trials they underwent as young orphans who got recruited and trained by a self-help school for at-risk boys.
A divorced couple remain good friends even years after the divorce. Recently, the wife has been in trouble with the law. The detective has to decide who to interview first the husband or the wife.
A reporter starts killing people to raise money to keep himself alive and acquiring a huge following of faithful followers but he is discovered just too late.
A club asks for your help framing a rival club. You are asked to secretly murder 20 of their members to achieve this goal, after which you’ll be paid with $10,000,000. You’ll receive an extra $1,000,000 for every person you kill after the 20th. Your conscious says one thing, yet your wallet says something else.
17 years ago detective Anna Jones closed a murder case without finding the culprit. Now, she’s going to investigate the murder again.
You’re a freelance writer who solves mysteries as the story progresses.
You’ve been recently summoned to a remote country house in the countryside for a job interview and dinner with a local god. However he is found dead.
The king has a weakness. A peculiar gold ring which reveals his deepest and darkest secret if he ever removes it. He is never seen without it. The story is set in the times of kings.
You’ve been living with a criminal without knowing it. When you find out, you have to decide whether or not to turn him or her in.
15 years ago the next door neighbor demanded that his neighbor to water his plant while he goes out of town. The wife, being a geek, couldn’t figure out that their water system hadn’t been working for hours on the day the neighbor would return from the vacation. The neighbor returns from her vacation and finds her dead body. Nobody planted the disease at her door so the police instantly think that she and her husband are the murderers. Two weeks later, the husband instantly dies from disease. You are a neighbor of the couple and witness the crime. Your powers of deduction would tell you that were another figure of the crime or that the couple commits suicide.
The tall man, as smart as he is, cannot walk a straight line. Since your childhood he has always been walking around. One day, he finds out that he is a fool that believes that he has always been walking around.
The girl of your dreams finally calls and agrees to a second date. But somehow, you don’t remind of this when a private investigator shows up asking for background information about her.
The private investigator finds the wrong child.
You have a close knit family or group of friends. This family or group of friends used to be a group of 5. 5 boys. One day one of them just disappeared. They search for the rest of their friend’s body and they find an ear. You have to find out who was killed and who did it.
A medical report will be given for death over lunch. You have one hour to examine the victim’s room and hack his computer using your special computer skills. If you’re not successful you’ll be executed for murder.
A story recounting how the current situation of several characters came to be the way it is. For example, how a super hero is born.
A popular internet personality dies and no one can find his wife. An all too eerie similarity to a true story.
The killer of your mother didn’t face the death penalty because the killer was your father instead. Even now, he is still out.
You walk home at night and stop a knife attack on the way. The next morning, a girl is found killed in the same place. The next night, you find another possible victim.
You had been hiking in the woods when you stumbled on a cabin with your dog. Neither wanted to go in but then you noticed a heart cut out of the door and the word “quiet” on the window.
A victim of your newest case turns out to actually be a criminal. He intends to make you his next victim.
What’s under the carpet in your flat? A time machine?
A wild panda in the zoo is found dead in the middle of the night.
The country has been taken over by a sociopath without regrets. As a little resistance fighter you try to help.
You are now walking around a graveyard. Then you remember you are dead too. There isn’t a grave for you though. You remember your own body is at the coroner’s office. You will now need to find your own grave and figure out how you died.
We have three mysteries on this list, though mystery stories are also amenable to the noir fiction slant and the psychological thriller characterization style.
Your husband has been murdered, the whole thing was just a cruel fake. No suspects or evidence to save and all your loved ones disowned you. The powers want you to take over the case, at least to find the new evidence.
A bunch of clever killers are trying to get you. You are in the process of dying of second-day-after-tomorrow-curse but you called them and told them where and when you’re going to die.
You’re going a little bit guilty in case violence occurred for saving the life of a murderer. As you’re trying to figure out how because you know the creature didn’t get to hurt anybody else, somebody else turns up murdered.
A corporate client hires your law firm to sue a rival. Yet, after filing the lawsuit, your firm receives a threatening e-mail declaring that the lawsuit will be unsuccessful. Convinced that the lawsuit is full of holes, your firm decides to say nothing of the e-mail to your client. Do you keep your firm’s promise of confidentiality or risk a lawsuit from your client for breach of confidentiality? The competitor turns out to be a rival hacker who had taken client’s documents and framed client for leaked information. As far as you know, your client committed nothing illegal. If your client was freed from his e-mail communication, the rivals would have destroyed him.
A girl next door has been found brutally murdered and the police suspect no one because all her family and friends say they never saw the killer.
A writer was hired by the Marquis de Sade himself to write his story. The writer sets misery and pain on an outrageous and virgin stage. After the writer dies, the Marquis breaks out of a mental asylum and comes to the writer’s house and tricks the writer’s wife into sleeping with him. He hasn’t forgotten that the masterpiece of suffering is still in her.
The detective leading your daughter’s case gets a lead, having seen her just recently. A man confesses to the crime, but she knows he did not do it. She’ll stop at nothing to find the real murderer.
A man calls your office to inform you that his brother had walked out of the house for some private errand. When he comes back, and his eyes are unrecognizable, he kills his entire family. Eight of you are asked by the brother to find out what happened to his family.
You are a lowly policeman in a big city with nothing to do. The phone rings…
You believe that a certain family member was found guilty of murdering someone, yet you aren’t convinced of his guilt. A detective is reopening the case and wants to speak with you or your relative. The only problem is that both of them died in a hospital some years ago, making you the prime suspect.
The cop you’re working for is turning into a corrupt officer.
A female professor at Rome University is found dead at the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa. Her panties are missing and are nowhere to be found. The only other evidence is a button caught under her fingernail, and on the button there is DNA evidence of several individuals.
The general public loves you. Your name is on the lips of everyone when it comes to serious crime. Everyone, but the law.
The 11th wife, Karen White, mysteriously didn’t show up for dinner last night, and you are the private detective hired to find her dead body. Her husband says she was never alive.
You end up in jail, brought there by a detective who was investigating the theft of his rare pokémon card collection – only to find that the pokémon cards of the collection you lifted haven’t been sold. What, exactly, is going on?
You own a gas station that’s at the top of a mountain. The first customer in a week explains you are holding her daughter captive and offers a million dollars of her own money to get her back. Despite your insistence the girl is not there and you don’t even know her, the woman pays you anyway, claiming the money is for you to hire a detective to find her missing daughter. Out of hope, you accept it and then she is killed as she gets to the bottom of the mountain. You hold her daughter in your arms as she is now orphaned.
You decided to go undercover as an inmate. Unfortunately you’re stuck in this jail for a little longer than you planned…
A man is murdered, in one of the most celebrated execution locations of the 20 th century. Most people are appalled, except for one but she can’t quite articulate how she knows this is the murderer yet no one else believes her.
A mountain climbing expert takes a friend up a mountain to help him overcome his fear of heights but when the friend accidentally falls to his death the climber changes everything about what happened, even giving himself a prosthetic hand as well as altering his appearance and moving from the area.
Your daughter is adopted and you retain the original letters and notes you sent to adopt her.
A new detective is sent to replace your detective partner who unexpectedly retired. Nobody knows yet that you are the one who killed him.
First book it’s not only what’s between the covers that matters….The creation of a book that can withstand a person’s magical or physical attacks.
Your mother just died without you knowing it. She left you a letter.
A detective has been contracted to find an old book. Yet, he/she is not able to find a cover or title to this book.
Find a way to kill a human without any victim, corpse or any signs of the murder.
You wake up one morning to discover that your home has been burned to the ground and all your family is dead.
A magic pebble falls from the sky and lands right next to you. You pick it up and as you hold it in your hand, the power begins to grow stronger.
Within the span of 48 hours your high school sweetheart is courted by two people claiming to be him, although only one can be the true him. How do you proved the correct one?
You are in a burning building trapped by a raging mutant. One of your best friends is trapped with you and she is pregnant by another of your best friends. What do you do?
In the funeral of your wife you approach the coffin only to realize it is empty when you open it up. Your wife is not there.
You get kidnapped. At first you think it’s just another prank by your eccentric friend.
The unwitting prey of a brutal killer find a magic lamp post. It makes their wishes come true. The only catch is you get three wishes. A lot of things can be useful but deadly.
After digging through your grandfather’s attic, you heard him scream. When you rushed in with your mom and dad, he wasn’t there. You spot him again one day while visiting his grave. The day you catch him, he disappears.
The private investigator’s partner has been murdered in your office. It is investigated as a burglary as nothing was stolen. Your client is the person of interest. She denies any involvement in your partner’s murder. The partner’s mother believes her daughter is alive and is convinced that you are protecting your client.
A corrupt sheriff who makes everyone in the county obey her every command or die.
You meet a man on a plane that claims he has kidnapped the woman who is sitting underneath a wig.
An ordinary accountant is thrown into an extraordinary adventure when a client tries to kill him. The client is revealed to be an alien from Venus when she is caught. She chooses him to lead the ministry of interplanetary relations.
So you know your husband, is cheating on you. You find out the woman’s name. So you go after her. Only to find it was actually your husband’s cousin. So a few days later you kill the cousin. Your husband then finds out, and in anger he hits you.
You’re trapped without food, without light, without water, without any chances of escape. You have 2 hours to find a way out – or die.
Someone kills you. To stop the killer you have to kill yourself.
It’s been ten years since the police haven’t found any trace of your children. Now the phones rings with a woman crying claiming she has your daughter with her.
They find buried beside the victim a nano black box with two buttons marked “Help” & “Unit-831”
You’ve just been struck by lightning and still somehow manage to solve your latest case.
A professor died in his office and everyone thinks it’s an accident. But the cops and one grad student believe it is murder.
You’re a freelance spy. You’re always looking to make extra money. When you are hired to spy on a neighborhood young couple, you don’t expect to get so attached to them. You become their trusted friend. You warn them about who to trust and who not to. To your surprise, they come to you telling you to quit because of an unknown threat. In the process, you fall in love with the young man you’re spying on …
This person is your daughter.
Every time a detective went to investigate the scene of a murder, he was taken back in time. The events, as ‘recorded’ by the detective were accurate. It was only when talking to other people that the facts of what really happened would conflict with the “official” investigators reports. The detective deduced nothing was happening in the real time, but was witnessing a past event being viewed from a different perspective
The victim of your last investigation comes barging in your office. He claims he saw someone that matched your description of the murderer, but you don’t remember picking him up for the job.
Detective lets the wrong man walk away after questioning, only to have this same man kill another person. Detective investigates to find his blunder had unforeseen consequences.
What happens when the psychic that does work for you has a vision, and it’s of you getting shot?
You are part of a door-to-door advertisement team in real estate. You just had a call from Mr. Morton an an older woman who has lived in her small house her whole life.
Your mother and father recently retired to the country from an apparently wealthy background. They lead an almost reclusive life on their ranch befriending little or no one. They’re now both dead under suspicious circumstances.
A vampire, a werewolf, a mummy and a little demon walk into a bar. They all decide to become private investigators, which company takes only the top applicants such as them?
A strange presence takes over a town that never existed, yet everyone in the town believes in with vigour. Also, only you seem to be aware of its non-existence.
A retired detective has been very successful in solving a case that still baffled all technical crime scene investigators. This detective isn’t popular among her peers.
A killer is killing well-off people but there is no apparent logical motive behind the kill. Then you find out the killer is killing them based on an actual motive and that hatred is not the one driving it.
You are a private investigator. Two bickering, perfectly normal human beings walk into your office one day wanting you to follow their suspicious wife/husband around town. You downright refuse. Then they come back the next day with PROOF as to why they suspect their spouse is cheating on them. You then agree to take the case. This is where the mystery begins in trying to figure out the real culprit in this murder. A cab driver.
A detective uncovers that a man was accused of a murder twenty-eight years ago. It was conclusively proved that he was innocent. The homicide case is still open.
You’re a cyber-gadget guy. Your gift-giving niece begs you to get her the latest toys. You try to get one, then find your niece murdered before Christmas.
While investigating a wealthy, but unpopular man, you learn he has a deep dark secret. He is a vigilante serial killer. He only targets criminals in jail and is not interested in prosecution.
A woman you know is found dead in a trunk. You are later accused of the murder.
This is a similar idea to the last one, different in execution. It took a very long time, and was a painful and ruined quest on your part, but you are able to positively identify the murderer, the modus operandi and the murder weapon to the police. Then on a slows news day, the murderer, gets away with it.
You were devastated when your fiancé, Helen, was shot. Luckily, she survived and she doesn’t remember a thing, not even your name. She’s engaged to someone else now.
Did you ever read a book you were sure was written for a specific person named you?
You can live forever if you are willing to do one terrible thing – tell a lie. Tradition says that you have to kill your first-born son and heir with your own hands in order to be granted eternal life. One day the time of the sacrifice comes, all family members gather for the ritual. Two teenagers from the youngest branch race ahead of the elder, hoping to be the one put to death.
You received appropriate training in knife throwing when you joined the Navy. The training officer promises you it will come in handy later. You didn’t believe him.
You are an archaeologist unearthing the lost secrets of another lost civilization. What will you find as you unearth their secrets?
A time machine is found. No one has actually tested it.
You receive a phone call from the person you kill in a dream.
The graverobber of famous people’s stiffs, when put in prison, had his own stiffs beheaded. Now after years of isolation, he heads out to kill again.
You start recording the latest session with the therapist, and he confesses to having an affair with your wife. He also says he didn’t kidnap your son. What do you do with the recording?
A highly intelligent mathematician returns to work after a long illness to find a stack of pink slips on his desk that a fellow worker has left him for solving a puzzling problem with connections to a long-forgotten country. The programmer seems to have driven an entire nation to riot in rage as a result of his actions.
Surveillance footage from a robbery reveals what was really going on, but the they never used the footage—until now. You are the defense lawyer.
Partnership is a major challenge in almost any business, but rarely is it as tricky and mysterious as in the case of the two cousins who become partners to set up a detective agency.
In every case you take on as a private investigator one of the key people turns out to be a previous client. How should you handle the conflict of interest?
A team of private investigators are brought together in what turns out to be a hoax. It is brought to their attention however that someone is bound to die when the reveal takes place. For whatever reason, people who fake their deaths always fake their deaths on the thirteenth of a month and this is the 13th.
All of the sudden there is a murder in your town that reminds you of a murder and the same detective that investigated, ten unsolved years prior.
Three generations of coroners gather for a wedding. One generation has something very shameful to admit. It is this family’s greatest secret and they are planning to tell everyone that day.
Your partner is killed and you are off the case. What would you do to get back to investigating the case?
You return to the place where you grew up. Looking forward to a nice nostalgia trip on the streets you knew so well. Only place you the name of the street is not the same. Then you find out why.
A normal night of drinking turns out not to be so normal. You wake up in a car not knowing how you got there, and an incinerated body is in the trunk. “Poetic Justice” is spray-painted in blood on the road as you drive away.
You’re coming off a tough breakup. It’s made even more difficult when your ex becomes a suspect in a murder case.
Your lover has been cheating on you for years. But you can prove absolutely nothing. He has been beating you too, but you have no proof either. He is the only one speaking up. You haven’t told anyone about the abuse and therefore there is no proof. Your lover, the police and the judge are convinced you are mentally ill and should be locked up to put an end to it.
Your dearly beloved wife was found murdered years ago. Buried as yet another “Jane Doe” for years, she has just been identified using new techniques.
You find an abandoned bag lying at the side of the street. Inside, someone is selling the bag and everything in it at a ludicrousy fraction of its value.
You frantically rush to the hospital to see your wife, dying of stage 4 cancer. Your daughter died in your arms eight years earlier. On your way a nurse stops you and informs you that in the car accident it wasn’t your wife but your daughter who died. Your wife just went into labor.
You become a crime scene investigator at the local police department. You only got the job because your father is still in command of the department. Work doesn’t go quite like you planned.
After all those years of lying about his dark past, a conman-turned-private investigator suddenly reveals the truth to his wife, who is in deep shock. She then leaves him.
This is not a new and updated list, it is the original!
Mystery solving partnership advertising an office solving cases. You get the idea.
The ultimate weapon that lets the user bend minds to do whatever they please gets stolen from the government.
While working as a bounty hunter you’re called to capture a man who murdered a rich family. The man seems innocent, but he’s resisting arrest and won’t give up the murderer. While you’re trying to arrest him, you hear noises in the woods. It seems your bounty is trying to pay off his bounty on his own. By murdering you.
During WWII, after the army captures the enemy’s gold, the Nazis threaten to kill the American prisoners of war if the army doesn’t give back the priceless gold. The army then commissions you with the mission to get the strands of gold through enemy lines alive.
You’re a sheriff, in a Western, who has just found out an asteroid is about to destroy the Earth.
Mentally unfit individuals have all been shared in one neighborhood. The neighbors have no idea. So they don’t miss the fact that all mentally ill people disappeared from their neighborhood. No trace of what happened to them. But the neighbors do miss the humane many of them were. Who is to blame when everybody is a little to crazy.
A team of supervillains gets together to commit a crime while a superhero is being honored at a fancy banquet. An unlikely hero comes to the rescue.
You travel back in time to stop a murderer.
As a kid you were close friends with a powerful crime lord. After a murder, of which the crime lord is either innocent or a victim, it is revealed your best friend committed suicide out of guilt. 50 years after that day you are a famous private investigator. Yet, after cracking the case the detective comes to you with new evidence that cracks your decades of certainty. Your days of business and easy living are over.
You have a string of bad relationships, all with women who have been missing for some time. You find them, they run away.
A psychopath challenges everybody to predict his future crime spree. When another body shows up, your only advantage is knowing what he’ll do next.
An inanimate object comes to life. But turns out not to be benign, but evil.
What happens when a prank goes wrong? A magic act goes wrong? A stage light breaks and kills the magician on stage?
A housewife is mistaken for a secret agent because of her partner’s expired gun while at grocery shopping.
For these mystery prompts please let me know in the comments section which ones you’ll be writing. Be sure to include the story title and a synopsis of between 500 and 1000 words. Answers to the challenges are due by midnight, March 25. Include a title for your submitted piece.
A secret society exists in your city with the sole purpose of murdering off the elderly. They are rational and organised. They’ve managed to hide themselves well. Its only a matter of time. You’ve been hired to find them
A man walks into the police station. He’s wearing a nice business suit. A little too nice you think. He is there to report that he’s a serial killer.
The hard part isn’t figuring out the truth, it’s knowing whether to tell your best friend.
A crime needs to be solved quickly or an innocent friendship will be ruined.
You work as a part-time janitor in night club which is a f irst step to famous singing career. While cleaning up after the show, you found something valuable and decide to steal it. Now you have only 24 hours to accomplish it.
You are a psychiatrist working at a hospital. A patient claiming to have cracked the code of the human genome walks in and demands to speak to you. You return later that day to learn the patient disappeared on her way to her cell after her meeting with you.
A good night of work on cases filling your reports with notes. Then your door bell rings…
Three children are in the process of being divorced and need to have counselling. You decide to do the counselling, the whole lot of them together. Your method of doing so changes their lives.
A portrait of a deceased person has been cursed to kill everybody looking at it, to settle an old grudge. Your job as detective is to find the painter and find out the motive behind the cursed painting.
You receive a phone call that your next door neighbor has been murdered – stabbed to death. You find the body but upon investigation you realize that the murderer is hiding in your living room. The police arrive just as your neighbor is pushing his way out of your home and calling himself innocent. You shoot him dead. You are arrested for killing the man who was attempting to leave the country and for the murder of your neighbor.
Mystery Island is an island full of natural magic of some sort or other, but the true nature of the magic remains hidden from all but a handful who live there. There are also all sort of oddities on Mystery Island which interfere with video, photographic and audio recordings. As a result Mystery Island remains somewhat of a mystery even if a video or photograph of the island does make it to the Net.
Your wife hires you to find her long lost brother she hasn’t seen since she was what, 6? Bad idea, she’s been found dead.
You and your detective husband, George, have been hired by a rich businessman to watch over his daughter Jane. She just came back from a trip abroad. You discover she’s been faking her trip, and when you ask her why you hear that some influential businessmen of the town are part of a human trafficking business.
A butterfly knife is perfect for butterfly-people but a bad idea for Earthlings.
You would like to live a better life, maybe be more artistic, how about being more outgoing?
You are kidnapped. You wake up in a sawmill strapped to a table. The last thing you remember was going to bed in your own apartment. You hear footsteps and something sliding on the table. The footsteps come closer and you get scared. Then the voice says “Good morning”.
The whole office has been stealing from the boss multiple times and deep-flushing the items down the toilet. Finally, the boss finds out, but he is too contrite and empathetic to the the thief’s pleas. Now he is no longer scared of the revealing of his losses and has willingly agreed to be taken advantage of even though he knows it.
You are chosen by a rival triad of your city to investigate and prove which is the strongest triad. You find out that all three are not only aware of each other but form a network by having different territories.
You are a private investigator looking for a big payday. This is your chance! There is a briefcase with $750 000 of cocaine in your office. You can’t turn the money in until you find the owner and one other person.
An 11th century scroll is discovered at an archeological dig. The scroll holds the secret for an ancient civilian for power. You have 48 hours to discover what the scroll is about.
Something haunts you. People tell you that it’s all over and that you should give it up. They are half right, you should never give up. If you do, you won’t be able to catch that familiar scent in the air, that smile that makes you feel warm, the taste of that coffee, the soft kiss of the wind on your cheek and the sound of your name being whispered in the darkness.
You get mugged and your purse got stolen. When you report to police telling them that it contained some items of value, the chief ask for them back. He also asks you to join his detective crew.
A serial killer makes a deal that every time they get caught, they will write a book on how to not get caught again.
An old newspaper reporter contacts you for information about five murders he tied to a certain writer in Harlem. Seems like he couldn’t get the full scoop because the writer died 10 years ago. You are the only one who knows that the writer was innocent and you have to prove to the reporter or you’re framed for five murders.
A woman from your rookie days approaches you about a case. An adventurer was said to have found the location and power source to leave the galaxy. He lived but now has chronic migraines and can’t speak to anyone.
You want to tell your boss about gambling expenses he missed at work but you’re afraid he’ll fire you if he finds out you were gambling. What will you do to tell him?
While searching a cave for a missing explorer you discover more than expected.
A man is being consumed by a mysterious disease, causing him to change personality. Everyone that works around the man has change personality accordingly, including everyone at his work, his whole town, and his lover.
Sure money is tight at your company, but doesn’t the desire to uncover the fact your boss is embezzling from your company outweigh any moral restrictions you have against it?
After your parents’ death you open their secret safe and learn that they are reviled and shunned cult leaders.
When the last surviving boatwoman refuses to testify the case against a boat captain who’s been smuggling cocaine goes to trial.
Or a list of events that happened this month.
While on a family vacation to see their newest remote cabin your father goes missing. Since it wasn’t an accident, you naturally go out to look for him.
Jim Bob is the richest man in town. His house turns out to be designed to confuse and trap anyone who enters it. Since Jim Bob designed it, he’ll be able to enter it easily.
A demented librarian.
A best-selling novelist, whose books you love, calls you and asks for your help to solve the mystery of her missing husband. The first possible suspect turns out to be her 12-year-old daughter, her actual author of her bestsellers.
The main inspiration for this is a lot of modern detective shows. From ‘Breaking Bad’
You have photographic evidence that you committed a murder ten years ago. Now they are after you.
A small town, in the remote corner of the country, has been the subject of an activist campaign for decades to have a toxic dump removed. Finally, the government agrees to remove the dump from the town. Who’s been dumping in the illegal dump? Why is the dump being emptied? Who is being protected by the Environmental Protection Agency?
Waking up naked on the beach is bad enough. But not knowing who you are adds to the insult.
Two girls start a fight at the bus stop, one has a knife, the other has a gun, both claim self defence, why wouldn’t anyone believe them?
You take the case, of course. You always take the case. You always do what you can to help. No matter what the odds are, you like a good mystery.
You attended a wedding of an ex-girlfriend of friend. Things didn’t quite go as planned however.
It is the summer of 2001 and your hometown has a UFO problem.
You’re a newlywed wife looking to spice things up at home. You fool around with another man and end up pregnant.
You and one of your fellow citizens come to the determination that most crimes committed in the city are usually CCTV-covered, and decide to hack into the CCTV and try to solve the case online. But, via the CCTV footage, you find out the names of the real killers, the investigation gets scary and you realise you’re on a hit-list.
A dead serial killer has written a note for you before dying.
A police detective learns the boss he hates is being protected by someone he loves. The two detectives must put aside their differences to find the real killer.
You’re a Texan returning home from a deployment to Afghanistan. On your low-budget flight back you meet the first officer who used to peep at your daughter while she was changing. After stewing over it for the rest of the flight home, you confront him upon your early arrival. Everyone who defends him is swiftly murdered under some trivial but absurd false pretense. You decide to get revenge.
Your wife/husband was last seen coming up from the cellar when you heard a bang downstairs. 20 years later you have still not found your loved one. Have they been abducted?
A man walks into your office and says that he wishes to hire you to investigate his parents’ murder 10 years ago. He secretly already found out who murdered them, and now he wants you to give him some peace if they are dead or 10 years of torture if they are still alive.
Just when you hoped it was over, a murder scenario occurs right outside your doorstep. You have no choice but to catch a killer.
You blind sister went missing on her way back home. The place she disappeared, her bag was left. Along with her usual stuff, something new was found.
That creepy neighbor down the street, you always thought was watching you. You realize he is.
One sweltering summer night in the city, two waitresses arrive at an apartment building to deliver a pizza. When they ring the bell to get inside, they realize the door is open. They decide to investigate inside.
A serial killer escapes from prison and murders a few people before returning. Agents working outside the prison want him back, no matter what, as he has knowledge about other agents. Yet, when he returns, he refuses to talk to anyone but you. All you wanted was for the bodies to stop cropping up on the axes between your toes.
Your life is destroyed. Every friend you have, is gone. But there is one friend who sticks by your side, helps you get back on your feet and fight back. But who is this friend?
A serial killer wears the death masks. Can you break him?
All the good serial killers, murderers, child-kidnappers have to go when the spirits in the underworld prove to be prophetic by complaining to death about not being able to avenge their deaths by killing.
The love of your life is gone for good after an accident. It is too late when you realize you meant more to them that they ever meant to you.
He waited in his dimly-lit room for a damsel to come by and he … well, he does what he does best. Problem is, she takes it in stride. She not only knows her way around a bottomless pit, but she visits the pit to shop for new kicks from time to time.
Your client says he’s seen more. Turns out, the afterlife looks remarkably similar to this one on Earth.
You’ve been confronted with much more than your simple Sheriff was expecting when he was called out to investigate the suspicious death of an 18-year old teenager who lived in a town of 20,000. With the presence of no other investigator having set a foot in the town, and as you don’t really e…
You witness a double murder. In complete panic, you end up burying one of the bodies yourself.
A couple of years ago, you felt cheated out of a contract for an invention you designed. You figured he must have found out so you wished him dead. Strange, he died the same day. Now you find out he didn’t know a thing and the day you wished he dead he had gone to watch his daughter at cheerleader practice.
Sister Wray provides a nastygram to business partners asking why the police are constantly at their door.
Friend? Enemy? The trusted priest confiding in you to confess murder.
You discover that a mute girl’s remains have been buried for decades, despite never having been reported missing.
A man with nothing but his word against a serial killer turns himself in to the police. He claims the serial killer has been holding him captive for 20 years. It took him 20 years to find a location with no cameras and a cell phone signal to call for help.
You are working as a meter maid one day when you hear screaming coming from a nearby car. You open the door to find a young girl that claims a strange man has broken into the car and started beating her. She agrees to go to the police station with you and goes to confess her involvement
You were expecting a simple LARPing mystery story. Turns out the LARP was for real.
A serial killer re-lighting past fires and establishing a grisly legacy. Trying to stop him is a detective with nothing to lose because his sister was his last victim.
You know how all the peasants revolted against the king. The king asked for your help finding the ring leader, the man who made them revolt. You find the key piece of evidence to set a man convicted of an atrocious crime with no time to live free.
Late at night, you drive outside your city to see a dying kingpin of the underworld. This conversation is spur of the moment and highly unexpected. How do you handle it?
In a time of armies, clans and kingdoms, a young man wants to enlist under the most powerful general to earn a chance in the army.
When you were an android a group of humans performed a heart transplant on you. You are beginning to remember your past.
You are a guardian angel, it happens quite by accident when you intervene to save a baby from being hit by a speeding car.
It should have been a shoo-in case for a hard-nosed detective. After all, the suspect testifying was a mute, and the case never went to trial.
You are a financial advisor. For decades you have moved money around for the kingpin of a notorious crime family. When that family reaches the height of its power everyone involved with the family is killed. Almost. You.
Fleeing a criminal who once beat you up for witnessing his crime, you come across an uncanny cabin that’s about to became your new home. This is Deathwatch.
Your half brother has just died from cancer in the asylum he has been in for 30 years. You decide to visit the asylum to find out what has kept him there so long. You meet him there to discover he is actually 40 years old, despite him being declared insane 30 years ago. He says that he has a secret that the government would kill to keep quiet – only you can save him.
You are shaken by a phone call out of the blue. It’s your wife. You haven’t spoken to her for 25 years. She asks you for a divorce.
A 27 year old case resurfaces. Or so the newspaper says. The only eyewitness died last year.
A murder takes place at your adolescent friend’s house and you have all the evidence on your tape. Unfortunately, you forgot to turn it on.
You get secretly filmed by two girls in a flagrante delicto situation. You have no idea why they did that to you.
You’re in the business of locating human beings. It turns out one of the most powerful people in the world is someone you’re trying to find.
Jack the Ripper never was caught. Great detective work today by the Scotland Yard reveals all of the details on the murders. It was a woman, a work of art.
Cupid occurs to you as a private investigator who is also a miracle to almost all clients he is employed with. It isn’t because they are too heavy handed of love. He is an absolute failure at love himself.
The victim unknowingly took with him a painting which is actually a reverse Van Gogh. The guy who commissioned the painting is going mad trying to retrieve it. To do this, he gets you to take the place of another PI who was recently murdered. The killer, however, plans to kill you the moment you find the painting.
You get a case from an old friend. If you take it you can never find them again.
A successful author of crime fiction is on the run from the killer of his ten-year-old daughter. He returns to his hometown with a plan to nail the killer. He is a magnificent detective but his own wife could not identify him.
You were on holiday in Paris and went out for a late night meal. It didn’t turn out well.
Twenty years after your daughter was abducted a detective finds you to reopen the case. The detective turns out to be your daughter.
When you were a kid you were friends with a person you thought was the next great horror writer. It turns out he was, but if got possessed by an ancient evil entity and turned out to be a monster.
The police have a hard time figuring out who killed the detective working the case. It’s only when they find the tattoo on his body that they realize it’s one of the two detectives on the case.
In order to prevent a string of murders you accede to a mad man’s request to enter a time machine where he will show you the future. Your roommate, who has no interest in this topic, will come over, and you’re sure some shenanigans will occur.
You, a cop, is your brother, a quarterback, killed by a drunk driver. A year later that drunk driver returns to town and swears to you he’s innocent. Making things worse he personally befriends you, avoiding arrest by playing you like a weak, grieving pitiful brother. What do you do and how do you do it?
Your latest client is dead. You triple check to make sure anyone else knew you had the client and then you call the morgue. When you arrive at the morgue a half hour later the client is gone.
An old cat lady has developed something of a cult following on Facebook. Find out why.
A killer wakes up one day tired of killing. The real reason to why and how the killings started are more sinister than anyone expected.
You’re a professional investigator that specializes is gathering evidence for divorcing couples. It’s a great living, untill you come across the husband that’s immune to honey traps. Of course that only proves to you that he’s very likely to be innocent.
There’s a secret island off the coast of South America. What evil lurks within it’s shores?
The victim leaves clues that he has been killed and thinks it’s a joke instead of actually getting killed. He meets with others like him only to find out that he was killed.
It is a perfectly normal autumn day when you realize that some of your friends are turning listless and judgemental. They stalk you throughout the last days of your life.
Your dog is a psychic and can predict crimes before they happen. Simon is too stupid to learn new tricks.
During a plane crash, you’re stranded on a deserted island with 3 other survivors. However, you soon learn that 1 of the survivors is not who he seems.
Your mom left her fortune to be divided evenly between the five of you, your four siblings, and your uncle. You’re arguing among yourselves which one of you he is.
You are on death row awaiting execution. As your only visitor, the executioner is coming, you will finally admit guilt to one thing that you never did, one thing you will regret for the rest of your life.
You buy an old, dusty shelf at a garage sale and when you look closely at the books you find a hand written journal from the 1930’s detailing a local urban legend.
The King is murdered at his own engagement party. You’re the elite royal homicide detective.
A publishing company shut down, only to reopen again 10 years later. Now the scary events that shut them down 10 years earlier are happening again. This time you’re the only one who can solve the mystery of what’s going on in that company.
Your childhood friend was murdered and thought to only be a statistic in a serial murders spree. Months later they announce the arrested serial killer, one you knew personally as you played with him down at a river as a kid.
A teenager is murdered ironically on Friday the 13th. But the police don’t know exactly how the murder happened. They still do not know the cause of death.
A starving mother murdered a neighboring farmer to feed her family. The neighbors disapprove and insist on playing trial. A newly established law states that all non-serious crimes are to be treated as non-serious and perpetrators are to be forgiven 15 years of jail time. Yet the neighbors refuse to forgive the mother. In the end, the mother goes to trial, inevitably gets convicted and immediately executes at the gallows with a prepared Kool-Aid. There are still arguments whether to pardon her or not.
You are the only human on Earth immortal and have lived to experience two Alien Invasions. You set out to find and defeat the aliens for good.
After a car accident you find a message from your daughter in a library book from 2 years ago. She is still alive.
Third in a series of three small games designed around a horror setting called ‘No Man’s Land’.
Suicide rates are high in your country during the t winter months. You know this as a fact because suicide is the company you work for. While everyone is trying to figure out why the suicide rates are increasing, they fear the possibility of a threat. But no one knows what it will come from.
You’re invited to a party by a colleague to meet the rich. One of the guests at the party, a kid who seemed innocent, asked you if you could help him find his father.
Your wife has been murdered. The police have no clues. You are determined to find who has done this.
Two people are on a desert island. One has to blow up the other to kill a shark about to eat them.
A very successful, rich man hires you to dig up some dirt on his wife. You find out she has been living a secret life. When you confront her to hand over the information on her ex she goes missing. Everyone seems to have a motive to kill her but you are not so sure…
Your recently deceased wife was a jewellery dealer who got sucked into a counterfeiting scheme and was killed over it. You spent all the wealth you inherited through her estate to solve the mystery of her death.
Arguably the most beautiful heiress of the world is kidnapped, seeking 1 billion from her rich and powerful family.
You are forced to kill a man you dislike due to his repeated poor treatment of his staff. He turns up murdered and the entire staff are implicated by the time of police investigations it turns out they all wish to. Expert witnesses swear your innocence.
A terminally ill billionaire offers a reward of $5 million dollars to anyone who would kill him and then appear to be murdered. The method he prefers is a Three Musketeers Bar.
Your roll through the neighborhood is amazing. You know who all the stalkers are, you know what all your neighbors look like and you have a few of them perma-rolled on you apartment’s surveillance camera. That’s enough, isn’t it? No, they say. One night you are broken into and robbed.
A high school band, God-on-high style.
Drew is a private eye whose career was saved once when hunted man Max knocked her out, then again when Max accepted a job from Drew to care for her when she came out of hospital. Max died in hospital 5 years ago, but Drew got to keep his dog. Now that dog has been shot, and it looks like it will be up to her, in more ways than one.
A post-materialist world where anyone can transfer their mind to another body, even a human. They can then go back in time to the body to correct the mistake.
Police receive a call from an unknown caller. The caller, claiming to be evil, instructs a police officer to kill the officer’s family. The call is traced to your cell phone.
It is the magical day before your wedding, and you and your fiancé are holiday shopping. ____ disappears, and you have to search for her boyfriend as she obsesses over the dress.
You’re married to a police detective – you know the family is hiding something from you. The night you confront him about your suspicions, he disappears.
A detective who solves crimes by talking with the dead helps catch a serial killer. In the end, the detective becomes a suspect in the murders, and the deceased lead the way to finding the real killer.
Two people are found dead. One has a shallow grave, the other has multiple stab wounds. The detective finds that they were going to the Latvian consulate together. The detective finds an address book and calls a number. The person is found to be a 4 year old niece of the killed person. A suspect for the murder is the time travelling brother who knows nothing about the killings. They are in Arizona.
A reporter is tracking the investigation of a new serial killer. What he starts to uncover when he is home alone at night is a representation of the profile of the killer- all from his own hidden secrets.
A boy is kidnapped to be… what else?
Two car accident survivors are writing a book on their experiences. Their book’s success and that of their press tour is middling up until the moment in which the college dropout driving the car admits he was the driver who killed 2 people in 1993.
You were sitting on your couch when your phone rang. You answer it at once. Now, you don’t remember anything of the call, but you have to solve a murder case and you only have 90 minutes to do so.
Coping with a double homicide will be easy. Coping with someone dressing up as the killer to scare you will prove to be difficult.
Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, he has been found to be innocent of his archnemisis’ double murder. As Watson you must solve the case to give exposition to the truth. As Sherlock you must remain silent to not incriminate yourself or your archnemesis again.
Identify the killed body with the help of a single tile piece.
Your brother, an actor, drinks a cup sent to him via courier. 10 days later he is dead. It turns out the tea was poisoned.
You work for a detective agency that employs the finest, the biggest…Tell someone you work for the Bigshot Investigation Company.
You awake in a pool of blood. Beside you is the fresh corpse of the victim you were hired to find. All it takes is one look at the victim and you know that you’re next on the hitman’s list.
A hitchhiker whom you stop turns out to be a ghost. Or maybe he is real, but you do not know it at the time. Find out then.
Once your only daughter went missing twenty years ago, but you held out hope that she might find a way to let you know she was all right. Then a special bulletin finds its way to you telling you exactly what you fear in that moment.
A man calls your radio show for help, telling you something that only you and the killer know and the situation is dire. The caller will commit suicide in front of you if you refuse to help him.
You are a detective. Every lead you follow must be authorized and filed. You earn points each time you follow a lead and open an investigation. A lead can only be opened once. You win the game if you have enough points.
The day that a well-respected General dies under mysterious circumstances, two soldiers enter a diner in Santa Anita to have lunch. Just as they sit down in their comfortable booth, they notice a box start to rise from the middle of the floor to hover 5 feet in the air. A metal container levitates out of the box, and opens. To the soldiers, it’s as if the impossible has happened.
The poor little Magnificent Seven works as cops to protect the old ones. Unfortunately, there are only four little ones left this night.
Two teenagers find a wand in the woods. They also find a note that says “wish for a million dollars”. After using it, the wand disappears. They wish for a million dollars and don’t get it. The blow though is that 5 million dollars had switched places with the cash they had.
In one day, your whole life has changed. You’re now an airline ticket agent in the year 2036.
After all the stories you have read or heard about Prometheans, you have the opportunity to lead one through his Fire-forged Avatar and Paragon path up to the doors of the Bronze Hall. Do you walk through?
You have 13 tattooed numbers across your arms and hands. When read in order they blatantly reveal the name of the killer.
Your foster child comes back to you to get help to avenge her foster parents’ death. You disagree with her plan and choose family unity over justice. As you watch your foster child suffering and pining aside you for hours, days… you cannot hide your guilt, your cowardice in the face of justice.
After a car crash you find you suddenly have a genetic disorder with a 50% of chance of killing you within a year.
Two bodies are found in a locked room. The door is locked from the inside. No murder weapon, no dust on the windowsill, no obvious way in which the victim could have killed themselves.
You are stranded on the Moon, and can survive only if you can inspect all the places you need to be in the next 6 weeks.
The only witness to a murdering method calls to hire you. The witness is the murderer. Please contact me through this web site under the contact tab to discuss pricing and availability of my services.
You don’t remember drowning your wife. But there is the crime scene photo. And your fingerprints. And blood samples. Bail’s set in the millions.
Zero is struck by his best friend with a lit cigarette while riding his bike and suffers a bad leg burn.
You introduce a new perfume designed to attract people of a given type. It turns out to be a sensitive nerve agent.
Spells are now legal, and a spell researcher becomes increasingly frustrated with the attention of the media for the atrocities a group of terrorist are performing against common citizens.
An army of beings from another planet are infiltrating all government systems on Earth. When confronted by the authorities, they start shooting first. Needing the help of a crack sniper you help coordinate a counter attack.
A soldier accepts the Mission Impossible task of building a peace Unobtainium fusion reactor in Afghanistan. However, what seems impossible becomes quite possible when you invent the invisible tool right at hand.
Holmes on drugs?
The dead-end job that nobody wanted to work in became the best interview of your life.
The local amusement park is being converted into a shopping mall. A woman’s decapitated head is found buried under the roller coast, the body is over at the former mascot stage where the horrible thing was buried years before.
You are a private detective living a happy life with your wife. One day, a mysterious woman whose beauty is extremely obvious shows up at your office. It turns out that she and you had a one-night stand less than half a year prior to the day. She’s five months pregnant… with your daughter.
After finally catching your nemesis in the act of crime you celebrate with a drink and fire your gun into the air to announce the captured criminal. The bullet finds its way into a satellite orbiting earth and starts a chain reaction that causes a critical problem requiring a quick resolve.
Write about two unrelated crimes that involve you and you get to share the limelight with the detectives, saved at the last second by your skill as a planner and detective.
Your new client claims to be a werewolf. A real one, the full moon and all. He was bitten two weeks ago and had been finding it so difficult to fit in…
Celebrities move in next door. The two of you become good friends and you solve mysteries together.
A celebrity of some sort was murdered. Was it his long-time manager, who is in the middle of negotiating for a larger share of the dead man’s estate? Was it some long-lost relative? Was it a random fan who wanted to be famous? The only clue is that all evidence points toward one suspect… and the killer is asking you to solve his murder to prove his or her innocence. Unknown to you, they are innocent.
An African village woman comes to you with a story. A little girl came to her in the night begging her to take her away from the men in the village. When the woman went back into the dark clinic where the little girl was being held, she found no little girl but only three great big skulls.
A Senator contracts your agency to keep details of his affair with his intern secret from his wife. He is running for the position of president.
A giant meteor has crashed into your backyard. Instead of meteoric rock, you discovered a little girl made of stone. The little girl looks expectantly up at you, tears a rip in the ground with her hands and takes a single step back.
The crime happened in front of your house. You wrote down the license plate of the suspect’s car. He gets arrested. The detective says “he’ll get off on a legal loophole.” You threaten to kill him in a unique way if he’s let off the hook. He laughs.
You wake up in a private jet bound where the last thing you remember was falling asleep in the backseat of a moving cab. You must face the reality of who you really are and seek for rational explanation why all this is happening.
Your synagogue receives a series of threatening letters from an anonymous source. The synagogue turns to you, the go to guy for solving cases, to solve the mystery.
You find a typewritten document in an old guitar case. The ink is brown, but the color is distinctively black. The document suggests Han van Meegeren, an Amsterdam art dealer and forger was actually being ironic.
You are walking through a street-fair with your family when you see old high-school friends. They secretly know who you are and that you’re wanted by the police. You don’t want them to get hurt, so you leave with them. The problem? You have to go on a crime to prove your innocence before you can pretend to be innocent.
God lived on a planet in a parallel universe. He got tired when he saw how people suffer and the evil in this reality. He committed suicide on his planet and died. God’s friends and relatives are all having a wake for him. The character is invited to come out here to see what happens when someone dies – bureaucratic circular arguments about funeral wills, who to inherit things, etc.
Your partner in your PI firm is brutally murdered in your own office. Blamed to have killed your partner, you are soon on the hunt to prove your innocence.
Your husband has been kidnapped. You had a plan A, which failed. Now you desperately need a plan B, a plan so insane, it has to succeed.
A stranger appears in your office who can prove aliens exist. He hires you to go to Area 51 with him to find proof this time. His plan? Steal it out from under the government’s nose.
Declares that he’s innocent on all rape charges and leaves the court laughing maniacally.
You run over a young boy chasing a ball in the street. Years later you apologize by buying his ball collection, now grown and valued at half a million dollars, which results in his murder.
Your professor is being murdered, none of your suspects is human. They’re dolls. As expected, all your evidence shows up nowhere.
The detective you are working for happens to be the best friend of your father. His ghost, or some other supernatural entity, contacts you to help your mother, who was murdered years before.
Neighbors going missing doesn’t concern you until your daughter goes missing.
You wake up in a park, next to a dead body, and get arrested for murder. You insist you’re innocent. Why would no one believe you?
The little girl you babysat every weekend is being molested. You call the cops. No one will believe you. You start to suspect her father.
You wake up in a small apartment you don’t recognise. You’ve been drugged and are being watched. You must find out where you are and how you got there if you want to escape.
A coworker, who is being cheated on by her husband leaves her fiancé and accuses him of domestic violence. But she hasn’t reported it. She just hid the bruises from you all.
A man walks into your office to discuss his wife and son disappearing a year ago without a trace. The wife turned up dead in the sewer yesterday and the son is missing. Now the man wants you to find the man who killed his wife and find his son.
You have access to a time machine. You use it to visit any period of history, ancient and modern. You and your friend never agree on what period of history is best to go to. So, to end this argument and decide for once and for all the best period of history, you decide to build two time machines and race each other to arrive at a spot in history first.
You’re at a family member’s funeral, when the pianist starts playing your favorite song.
Several friends have been comparing their scars and tattoos. One evening they disappear without a trace. Days later you learn that the police has arrested several people, which the scars match to your friends. You set out to shed light the crimes and expose who was the real culprit behind your friends’ disappearance.
A Mid-Life Crisis thief is stealing high-end items from the rich. Regardless if it’s expensive jewellery, fancy cars, or high tech stuff. … he steals what he likes. And this time, he’s targeting your stuff. Do you keep your cool or do something else?
The police are investigating the death of a corrupt mayor. Everyone except for a group of protesters across the street everyone is being interviewed. Yet the protesters are on tape protesting in a way that could have killed the mayor.
You’ve found out why scientists are all killed, but proving it is a different matter. Three countries want you dead, and they are all lining up to try to end you first.
Lieutenant, this man claims he’s In-N-Out’s district manager. Can you check that? I’d like to believe him but something tells me something is not right.
A collection of letters from a writer to their lost love. The writer is sent a package containing the lost love’s actual letters.
A man steps off a bus in the middle of nowhere and suddenly clocks 12 people pointing guns at him. He has no idea what he did.
You were an orphan who was adopted into a nice seemingly normal family. A few years ago you found out that you were the head of a crime family. Now you have ways to find if they were behind your adoption and if so how high up does it go.
Start with the body. Add the time, place, protagonist, witness, motive – and no clues.
You and your childhood friend plot to get rich by stealing the mob’s money after an important event. Days after the heist a detective comes to your house looking for your friend. The detective turns out to be your friend, now a policewoman.
30 years after your brother-in-law disappeared without a trace, you find index cards in your mother’s basement with initials of family members and made-up stories. You sift through all the cards to find two sets of names that fit real people. Add in your mother’s journal and it seems that the two people she made up stories about for 30 years and may hold up the truth about what happened to your brother-in-law. You go in search to find the people.
After working 25 years as an insurance agent, you are finally promoted at a national company. You realize that you only have one paycheck coming in, your salary, and you rent the entire house.
A local corporate giant’s son was found dead in his dorm room. You get hired by the family to investigate the death.
Two murdered, one seriously injured. If it weren’t for the hand written note left at the scene, the police would call it murder suicide.
“Right” and “wrong” have been redefined in court rulings based on “generous”. Everyone will claim to be generous, but you’re the judge and jury in a case about to go to trial.
Your wife is cheating on you. You decide to hire an outsider to investigate. It turned out that she was not cheating.
You’ve just landed the best job in the world…you’re a bodyguard for the president. You’re going to the presidential gala, when people start disappearing, bodies are piling up, and the vice president is framed for it all. It turns out the president is actually an alien who tried to offer you as his meal when he leaves Earth to return home. You guess he’s still hungry.
You’re an interstellar diamond thief. An officer has figured out you are about to steal a diamond from space colony. You also discover the detective hired to foil your plans is your old partner.
You inherited your grandmother’s house, and in a room opened for you, you find a dead man. Now you must find out what happened exactly 50 years ago.
After a botched police investigation, you take it into your own hands to solve a cold case.
When you finally meet your partner’s family, you start hearing horrifying things about what she has said about you in private.
A reporter covering the murder of a woman was there when her head was bashed repeatedly with the claw of a stuffed panda. You didn’t expect to visit the house of an author. But you didn’t expect to find someone murdered right there either.
No one who has arrived at your cabin in the last twenty years has made it back alive.
You must kill a woman in self-defense, but you see her face, which is due to die. She looks exactly like your dearly beloved, who died a year ago. You cry out that you didn’t mean it, accidentally, or not, you were yourself.
A man is found dead in a cheap hotel with half his head blown off. He only has ID for a country he’s never visited.
Let’s make something clear before we get any further, this is not a list of suggestions for writing a mystery story. These are fantasy writing prompts that invite you to develop a family relationship.
A man comes to hire you for a chance encounter. It’s determined that your reality is not the same as the rest of the world.
The small island you inherited contains a tourist attraction that’s actually the gate to another dimension. You were the only one that believed it, and now your time exploring is threatening to close the other side, something your ancestor intended for you. Do you let everything vanish rather than see the secret of this island revealed?
You’ve been having a series of bad dreams about the future. That naked woman you keep dreaming about looks less and less kind every time you have it.
For an explanation without spoilers see comments below.The player character is mind controlled. She’s forced to do all these horrible things to innocent people. Eventually The player learns that she’s under mind control after all and that everything is alright.
To make the best out of life turned out to be more difficult than he had ever anticipated.
A disgraced occultist has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution for 17 years. You’ve been hired by his family to investigate his murder.
After years spent on the trail of a big-time drug dealer, you are finally given a big break that puts you on the brink of cracking the case. It turns out the big-time drug dealer is President Obama.
A cop arrives at your doorstep to mull his problems. The story is about the events of that night and what they mean for you in the long run.
An explosion goes off in an old elevator shaft. Telescopes have been built on that spot, but when they started looking, there was no sign of anything peculiar.
As an insurance investigator you were in charge of investigating a fire one day. That same day, you were supposed to take your boards to work as an actuary. You dropped off your boards at home and went to investigate the fire.
After the civil war ends the ex-colonel of your battalion is selected for president. You are kidnapped with a band of rebels.
A famous stage magician and source of shame to his 1800s British aristocrat parents is MURDERED. You gain access to his diary and try to find the killer.
A group of 10 homeless people get thrown out of their shelter in the coldest February for decades. Yet they survive and kill for a year before being caught. How? Why?
Being set up and framed as the fall guy for a murder means you are now a fugitive.
Your brother died in a car accident. You agreed to donate his heart because it was the law. Ten years after the funeral, you meet four people and you secretly know they got the heart your brother donated. This activates your heart to wake you from your grave to kill the four people who got his heart.
A detective is called to a small town where a grisly murder has taken place. Already the local PD are making noises about it being a hitman of some sort. He begins to look into that direction, only to find it’s a cover story to hide a long running feud within the town.
You came home to a robbery gone wrong. Now you are the prime suspect.
It’s the weekend and you planned to work on your novel all day. Suddenly, the power goes out. Also, everyone is trying to kill you.
The city with the lowest crime rate for the last year decided to award you with their annual detective of the year award. As you go to pick up the award a man attacks you with a knife. As you fight back and fell him he says he works for the runner up of the award. He was to kill the winner.
You are in an aircraft approaching Paris. “Terrorists have taken control of the aircraft and demand that 4 teams of 4 must play a game with their lives at line, or else.”
It’s difficult to explain how the machine works, made of sparkling colorful crystal with a few gems in it, but it can amazingly transport you to any movie conversation that you desire.
At a quiet new age festival in Petaluma, California, an old man is found dead next to a sigil drawn in human blood on a piece of wood.
Your husband has gone missing, the good news is that you managed to trace him to a remote area. Problem is, you aren’t completely sure if the person there is your husband.
10 years ago you had given your young brat of a daughter a decent camera, despite your protests. She disappeared shortly after that and was never found. Now she is back and you see her face on a missing person flyer.
You have a sister who is talented at science and one day she came up with a cure for cancer. After you and everyone else gets cured by her she revealed that she mixed something in the cure back when she was at the 222th floor of an 8 story building in LA. She goes on a 5 state trip to kill all those that habit it up to the 222th floor of their workplace buildings. You take the challenge and leave the detective agency. Now you’re going to find her and save humanity.
An amnesiac detective is tasked to find the perpetrators of the crime that put him in such a state. During the investigation, he falls in love with one of the suspects.
Step-brothers cannot be members of the same organization. It is within this tenet that this story begins.
Everyone loves your baking. Kind of.
Opening 97 year old hiking suitcases, they reveal a severed human hand from 1929.
You have no knowledge that aliens exist despite numerous accounts, reports and sightings. You begin to investigate the case for your good friend who work at MENSA, for their next publication on the possibility of aliens existing. Not only do you find there is a cover up but a conspiracy to make the whole world believe, any sightings were never real.
A psycho killer is one step ahead of you, leaving clues for you that only you can understand. Can you catch him, … or will you become a victim?
You are given the impossible task of killing the person you want to live for ever.
A woman finds her car window smashed and her laptop mysteriously vanished when stopping by the grocery store on her lunch break.
After having just murdered your boss, you realize your framing an innocent person. However you can’t turn yourself in, as you’re implicated in a series of other murders.
The mafia keeps asking you to do some work for them. The pay is great, but there’s no way you’re going to work for the mafia. It’s just that the pressure is mounting, and they keep on calling asking you to reconsider. Or you have no other option but to work for the mob.
A character from your old favorite pulp story comes back to get the one thing that his old partner still has – you.
A black rain is falling… but look closer. The rain leaves black marks on the ground and when you touch your black the rain stays.
When he was still a little kid, he watched his father die at his twin brother’s hands. So, how come he never told this to anybody?
You receive a call from a middle-aged man you’ve never met. He tells you that in the next week he will murder his wife and nephew. Then he will kill himself. Can you stop him from carrying this out?
Keys to a bank vault have been lost or stolen. A man looking for work at the bank agrees to crack the safe. The combination is 0-0-0. But when he opens the vault he see the bank manager’s body. He pockets the bank manager’s ring and uses what’s left inside the vault.
You are working for a large insurance company when you realize that they are committing fraud. Do you blow the whistle and ruin other people’s lives?
The most brilliant man in the world has just died, but a power struggle between corporations leaves his last few intellectual works and ownership of his company in dispute. The coming corporate war over these valuable patents changes the lives of your intrepid heroes dramatically for the worse, to the point where they declare bankruptcy and split to preserve what’s left of their integrity. But the enemy won’t let them rest.
“Living in Spain” is a tagline for your story.
You are an actor, or someone close to the actor. To your horror, you find out the actor is playing a villain in a new film.
A new gay couple move in next door to you. What seems to be a nice couple turns out to be a terrorism cell.
You’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer. You decide to spend your final few months by having a week of parties to make up for good times in your life. At the funeral you explain to your friend why you had to die and how it changes your will.
You are a bitter ex-con turned private investigator. Case after case you walk away with sore fists while getting a headache from the judge. Then, the cases start to get interesting.
A serial killer that only targets celebrities. Celebrities are disappearing and the media starts to get suspicious.
Your neighbor comes to you begging for help getting out of jail. She has no next of kin and it’s your wedding anniversary.
A man with no identity is found wandering half-naked on the beach. He can remember nothing. The only clue to his past is sewn into his leg.
A famous pianist has died and you have been entrusted by the family to not only find her murderer but find and return a famous diamond she once kept sewn into her shirt.
Your husband comes home from work one morning. You don’t recognize him.
You start a bird watching club as a way to find your soul mate. All members of this bird watching club must have identical hands to yours.
A detective has always covered up for his partner’s occasionally sloppy arrests. His partner is killed during one such cover-up, and the detective must investigate what really happened.
Someone you murdered comes back from the dead and kills you.
The girl you shared a tent with in the world’s biggest festival is missing. Someone says she went to the police but they didn’t believe her. You don’t know if that’s true or not.
10 years ago a man’s wife was murdered. He claims he found the body but was knocked out. When he woke back up his wife was gone. He ran into his baby about a year ago walking down a street. He grabbed his child and never saw her again.
An unstoppable killer, which can kill using only movies shows up.
A journalist has to track down someone called The Writer for an interview with his face enshrined on his book cover. When it is revealed that The Writer wears a mask the journalist is not only dead but a former employee of the murder. The Writer is real, very real. It’s time to make some waves concerning The Writer and his writings.
A young man has his eyes surgically re-gifted with the eyes of a serial killer. Blood begins to stain his hands and turn his hair red.
A man is targeted to die. He escapes death many times over, and lives until he’s 82. When his wife is murdered his faith in an afterlife is shaken. He makes friends with a recovering alcoholic priest, and that priest solves a murder while hanging out with the old man.
Half an hour before you head off for your vacation, you get word that your best friend has been murdered.
Based on Your Favorite Movie
A serial killer turns out to be a computer program that hacks itself into every operating system to commit its heinous crimes.
You have the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler for 25 million Euros.
A woman rises up the ranks quickly in a large, multinational engineering company. She quickly climbs to a position that rivals that of the company’s CEO. She seems to have it all, but is it her? For she always laughs distractedly and has a vague far away look in her eyes.
You have a photographic memory and come across a cyberneticist that is seemingly copying people’s minds into computers. They seem uninterested in this activity which makes you even more suspicious and log onto the mind computer even though it was clearly not meant for you.
A young diplomat goes missing while on a peacekeeping mission in Gaza. Or was he investigating on something much larger?
A serial killer is stalking women and a prominent anti-feminist is giving a speech on the campus at 8PM.
A hit man is tasked with killing a clone.
On your first day in the Police Academy, you get kidnapped by a killer with a mask and must return the favour by hunting down the killer as a cadet. He has designs to wipe out the whole human race and you must stop him.
You’ve been brought on to investigate the disappearance of a child right before Halloween.
You are on the way to the crime scene when you hear the police calling on the radio asking for backup at the location. The reason the crime scene is your house. Your family has been murdered.
You and your girlfriend hide a dead body, but his brother finds out and confronts you and your girlfriend 20 years later.
You are an alien sent back to 1976 to help humanity avoid World War III, but you arrive the day before the car accident that resulted in you being sent back in time. You must put the time in reverse and stop the accident from happening in order to save your people. Who or what is preventing you from stopping the accident?
You’re your way to work when you spot a building on fire. As you drive around the outside to get a better view, you realise the fire is spreading fast and is going to engulf your company’s building any second. You decide you have to do something. What have you missed? Can you stop the fire before it destroys everything?
An agoraphobic man has gotten a job that requires him to visit a client at their home for the first time. The client has the worst luck imaginable. He is left with nothing but a fortune cookie in his palm.
You’re a history teacher in a town obsessed with murder mysteries and old west gunslinging. One morning, you’re the only person who can solve a critical problem.
You’re a house cleaner, but not a maid. You clean up homicides. One day you’re called on a suspected homicide. Until you finish sweeping, it’ll remain a suspected.
A biographer comes to you for help when she starts to see all of the people she is interviewing seem to be tied together.
Prevented from killing himself, a man who needs to kill 6 more people to get his family inheritance takes a job as a therapist treating patients with debilitating mental conditions.
You’ve recently been hired by SM Technology to do some special encrypting work. There is something weird though, some of the emails you decrypt include words you didn’t think existed.
A twin sister turns up to tell you that she wants to go and live the life you always wanted. At the cost of yours.
Your city was hit by a severe flood a month ago. Since then, the flood waters receded, but left behind the desolation of post-flood life. One afternoon, a collar of pink foam washes up the shore. Inside, you find a golden scepter. Medusa is on the other end of the scepter.
You receive a call while on holiday from your dead wife’s first husband. He claims that he murdered your wife ten years ago while you were out sailing. He wants to meet you.
Someone is killing high school bullies, but instead of being the victims, everyone think that the bullies actually committed suicide. Can you solve the case?
You are a witness to a murder, but dispose of the body before the police arrives. Since they are unable to identify the body they do not know the victim was murdered and everything points towards it being a case of just plain old suicide. A week later a headless body is found a few kilometers away from the first one and it looks like the police will soon find out about your crime. The only person you can trust is your brother-in-law, the Chief of Police.
You see something happen that can only be described as magic, yet no one else seems to notice. Your worldview is shattered.
If you had a choice to either go back in time or to meet the devil, which would you choose?
You and your wife are serial killers, but your daughter is missing and officially presumed dead because she has been missing for 10 years. One day she ships you a box, and you find it to be her dismembered head.
An infamous killer finds himself framed by the actual person who committed the crime he has been accused of and is being imprisoned to await execution.
Is it what it seems?
You, a newspaper reporter, is sent to a small town to cover a murder. The murder victim turns out to be the town’s player. Now everyone from the cops to the magic users is out to stop you from writing the article.
After what happened, you thought that you would never be able to go back. You were wrong.
You find an injured man in a clearing in the middle of the woods. He has a story he is not telling.
Alexis is one of the best hackers working for the FBI. The problem is, her mom never knew her father. Her mother was a skank. Who’s dad is Alexis?
Always ready for an adventure, you jump at the chance to go to China. Then you meet the client.
Leaving on a Saturday morning flight, you are told your flight has been cancelled and you now have to leave on a Friday morning flight. That creates a NASA type problem for you.
An escaped convict turns to you when her aunt threathen to expose her reason of escape if she doesn’t retrieve an old letter from her old office before noon tomorrow.
The best mystery story prompt is that there is a mystery story about you. When you tell the world about your mystery, a tale you’ve been living with ripples of intrigue for the last few years, there is a journalist who thinks they can solve your mystery.
A lawyer asks for your help finding the letter you wrote about the drunk driving incident that killed your father when you were four. He wants you to sign a retraction.
You are shopping for your wedding dress when you find yourself being knocked out and awaken in your apartment. But something isn’t right. A prank perhaps?
An alien fossil is found in New Mexico. The alien surprise everyone as not only are they scientifically advanced, but they are genetically compatible to humans. Perversely compatible.
Unbeknownst to you, a woman hired you to follow her husband. One day she calls to meet her for a pickup. You arrive to find she has been dead for the last 48 hours and her husband is a total wreck and blames himself for everything.
Your detective was about to catch the serial killer that terrorized the city until your partner was shot by him. You and your enraged detective are now on your own to find and catch him.
The husband of the missing victim was considered the most likely suspect. However, he ran off as soon as she disappeared. Despite all evidence against him, he refuses to accept he did anything wrong. Moreover, you believe he’s innocent. This makes solving this case even more of a challenge as you have first-person information from a man who won’t even admit he has anything worthwhile to do with this case.
You and your friends are invited to learn about a brilliant business plan for a green initiative. It looks like easy money and your friends start investing then things turn ugly…
Sherlock Holmes is actually Jack the Ripper.
Having a cubicle in the basement of an ice cream parlor is not the kind of job you wanted after your MBA, but it’ll have to do. At least you enjoy the ice cream. Suddenly someone, apparently someone who enjoyed your ice cream too much, breaks into your home. When you call the police they start looking at you funny.
A lawyer is representing a friend of yours. You work as a private investigator. You are asked to help solve the mystery that your friend is accused of committing.
A man and woman go on a date to a local swinger club and want to spice it up so they go into one of the themed rooms. After 30 minutes of role play they realise the room is not empty.
The main character is an escaping convict. He is chased relentlessly by police. Although he cannot be caught, he cannot be moved from his path. Wherever he runs, whatever obstacles are in his path, he comes out alive and unphased.
Young Paul Munro is dragged out of bed by a enraged Mr McMahon. Six year old Paul threw a rock and moved Mr McMahon’s car, and now the man is going to kill Paul and his little brother Benedict.
You are hanging off a cliff. In a minute, you fall to your death.
You awake in a strange, dark and cramped room. In it there’s only a television and a bookshelf. Every new day you watch the TV and every day you seem to see pieces of how and why you’re in this room.
A stress support group complaining about working conditions and some uncomfortable officials within the police force decided to kidnap a witness to their illegal activities. They know he has information they need, but he doesn’t want to give it to them.
A man asks you to find his bride forced into marriage and servitude from a foreign land. He just wants her back. He offers you information that could lead to your success for free, if only you promise not to let her see him ever again. You realize there’s more to the case than you could possibly ever bargain for.
Everyone in the town of “Fizzletown” have shiny, aluminum colored skin. No one knows why and the town is surrounded by a wall so that the world outside cannot experiment on them. Then one day, something changes.
Contestants of a reality TV show that focuses on underworld activities are killed off one after the other. The contestants are so scared they have a shoulder angel and a shoulder devil whispering into their ears. Soon, those whispering voices start confessing to the murders.
After killing another person you know you did it. How do you go on with your life?
You are in a mental institution over the summer. One of the inmates is conducting an experiment. You are his latest subject.
A character with amnesia wakes up in a hospital. Everything seems familiar. There is no sign of aging. It turns out the character was frozen and doesn’t age!
A single sentence gives you all the information you need to solve the mystery. This sentence is given to you by a person with an agenda of their own.
A stranger visits your office and tells you that he has found a winning lottery ticket, with the guarantee that the first owner of the ticket will become incredibly wealthy. Both of you are strangers to each other, but you decide to play the lottery with him even though you have nothing to lose should you lose the lottery, due to your partner’s “guarantee”.
A fashion designer and a billionaire are both competitors with equally impressive success. However, the fashion designer takes the in for a song. Now the billionaire wants revenge..
Clarence, the sleazy pornographer is found dead and stabbed. You have no alibi for the night he was killed.
You kill a man in a crowded theater and hide the body.
You’re a surgeon on a humanitarian trip to Guatemala. The next story prompt begins here.
The most successful hitman you ever trained goes rogue and starts taking out the clients.
You’ve recently been given a machine which searches for dead bodies. With it you plan to bring justice to the hundreds killed in an accident a decade ago.
Werewolf story plot where the character is caught in a wolf trap by hunters. Reminiscent of Nightsong by Robert McCammon.
An old stop motion movie from 20 years ago has come to life and started slaughtering teenagers in your town.
Trivia New Zealand 2014
Now that you have finished your book, what do you do with it?
While en route to your peaceful vacation home you’re involved in a catastrophic accident. You step out of the wreck and realize the world you stepped in is not your own.
Years ago your younger sister went to college and just, disappeared. Even the FBI can’t find her notes of what she did, for she always reminisced to you of her great love for you, her sister. In fact, you found her binder, full of photos of you. One day in her binder you discover a poem about love and rape, now ten years later you went to prove her innocence. Years later you realize your sister was the killer herself.
A handful of dirt can prove a kidnapping or an affair. It can also provide evidence of murder, history, and geography.
DUI is the hottest ticket. There are too many drivers involved in accidents or criminals running from the police. All caused by drunk drivers. You set up shop to get drunk drivers off the streets to make them safer. You have already had 2 coroners since starting business. Sadly you evict the patrons of the bar that supplied the alcohol to the drivers. The bar gets it and pays you to stop keeping your eye out. You continue, addicted to the adrenalin and twitter followers your targets give you.
A child is diagnosed with hyper autism, a disorder similar to that of Asperger’s Syndrome, but with an especially early onset. What makes this news worthy is that this same neurobiological disorder has almost completely vanished from the earth.
You are the parent of a little girl who has just been kidnapped from her own bed. You receive a note demanding six million dollars. You have no lack of money, except that you’ve been away from your hidden money stash for two years, and returned to find it gone.
You are a detective working on an old cold case and your client has recently been kidnapped right in front of your office.
A man wakes up in his own grave at his own funeral. He gets up and starts to walk towards his gravesite.
Your junior partner tells you that she has a craving for a particular type of mudslime, and that she wants you to find it for her. The only way to get that slime is to find and talk to someone who lives outside the city.
You are one of a group of people who have volunteered to have their memories selectively removed for a military project. All you know is a few initials and a number.
A blind woman comes to you for help believing her sister is a witch! After you take her case she has a near death experience. Witnessing her re-birth, you decide it’s time to see if she really is a witch.
As part of a job, a cop infiltrates a snuff film production company.
Your mother gives you a call to say your brother died. At the funeral the priest reveals your brother lost both his arms in a car accident and is now working for the Catholic church for Francis’ hand. The priest hands you a cloth bag and it’s packed with 15,000 pounds in cash.
A client that was looking for her missing son turns up dead. The day after you have told your friend Jiand that you’ve taken his case.
A divorce lawyer, who simply plays by the rules, is pitted against her seemingly immoral ex-husband in a custody battle.
A young girl in a small village has been murdered. It’s more then her death, though, has become something to be feared by all who now believe that the girl has unleashed a curse.
Every year since you were 10 a stranger sends you a severed finger in a box during October.
The morning you are about to go to work someone calls for your help and it turns out to be your biggest nightmare. __________ The morning you are about to go to work someone calls your personal number and it turns out to be your biggest nightmare and you find out that the call wasn’t quite as random as it appeared to be.
A time machine is found. It is able to send something back into the past in time for a certain day every year at a certain time. You get coordinates, you go there and press the green button. Everything freezes, you shout “Get Em” and everyone runs into the machine. 10 years later you’re a rich transgender woman using your time machine to send stock tips to yourself so you can get rich. Also everything you own is pink, fridge included.
A text message, a video clip, a phone call. Something mysterious starts happening to you, which couldn’t come from the world as we know it.
A writer is penning the true crime book about the kidnappings of eight children over the last decade, and that writer is you. You find the real kidnapper. He’s not mad, doesn’t want to be famous, and he hides nothing about the crime. He just wants out of prison.
I can already see you crafting brilliant plots. Just imagine writing your own stories with some of the above prompts or by combining some of them in unusual ways. “Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.”
You are at a crime scene scouring the body for clues. A gum wrapper sticks out of a concealed pocket. Your job is to find the gum.
Someone has been sending you blank postcards for six years. Last one contains notes about how they abducted and killed your son. Can you solve the case?
An old friend calls you into his home to help him out of an unwanted situation or relationship.
You wake up for your morning jog, and a dragon lands on your car. You accept a quest to rid the world of an evil villain. Your reward would be a million dollars.
Enola Holmes, sister of Sherlock Holmes, is a famous and successful detective in the first half of the twentieth century. Her brother has always resented her success, even though he was a failure as a detective.
World War Two is over. On your route to Japan to return a favor for a foreign friend, you come across a plane containing explosives. Is this war booty or something more sinister?
A sociopath cheated on his wife for years with her coworker and is now caught and himself cheated on her with over 50 women in the past 8 years. She has never discovered the truth of his infidelity. Yet when the PI shows up at her doorstep with a tape of her cheating husband’s latest liaison on the arm of a high-priced callgirl she hires you to exact the ultimate revenge and one-up him.
After you won a competition where the prize was a one year trip to the moon, while up there you get accused of murder. You are the only one who can prove your innocence.
Describe a tragic event in your character’s past.
You find out that you are Sherlock every time you hold a gun.
What can never be seen in the dark?
A teenager who needs one summer to figure out what she wants to do with her life. It needs to still be called Summer Bite Detective Agency.
The strongest item in the universe – beyond a nuclear bomb. It sticks to everything and can lead to somebody knowing everything. The main idea behind this idea is quite simple, but as soon as one considers how such as object might be used, the potential is huge. While such an object or device might have been used in numerous ways elsewhere, there is a very limited list of ideas incorporating an actual object. Possibilities are endless.
A note from your past has thrust you into a mystery.
You come across a large overflow of a case you’re working on. You decide to sabotage the case. Yet, when you got rid of all the evidence somebody else dies in the same way as your client. Soon, you realize you’re in over your head and need to find the killer.
A reality show producer decides to make a program in which a killer is offered his freedom with the ‘purchase’ of 10 random lives from members of the public.
One morning you look outside and realize you put your pants on inside out and backwards… three days in a row. Why is that?
A young girl has been poisoned in Europe. The police investigate, but they think it was the fiancée who poisoned her. It turns out the girl is still alive, in a coma, in London. Your job, as a body double for her, is to protect her. Her fiancée, a very powerful man, is probably behind the poisoning. When you escape to Paris, he finds you to recover the girl. The mafia is after her behind the kidnapper to clear debts. The girl wakes up. She must decide if she is going to go back to life as she knew it, or to run and take her new life wherever it goes. You don’t have any say in what she will choose. Of course, murdering the fiancée would solve a lot of problems, but your own problems would outnumber it.
A pair of best-selling mystery writers feud publicly. One will kill and the other will end up in prison.
While working for a client, you find out that your client is trying to track a werewolf.
The world is ending in 30 minutes. But that’s the least of your problems.
The rookie detective of your city failed to catch the serial killer in action. That detective comes to see you, a former cop turned P.I., and asks you to help him find the killer, to help him redeem himself as the greatest ‘detective’ of the force. However, you suspect something is up but you cannot tell what….
An old friend hires your investigation service for an anonymous ‘friend.’ A reverse sting reveals that the anonymous friend is in fact your old friend’s own, long-lost sister whom they never knew existed.
A cold-blooded killer asks to speak with you privately, warned you to prepare because it is the last time you will talk freely, alive.
You double crossed the biggest drug king and now he wants his pound of flesh. You think you are untouchable and never made a single fingerprint in your life. There’s just one thing. You’ve never been lawfully arrested for anything.
You are a private eye working a case of three missing persons. When you find them they are frozen in blocks of ice.
A suicide detective is an officer on a special department. He only works on suicides who leave a note. After one year, he makes a living calculating the right time to take one’s life by based on average worldwide suicides and individual scientific factors. One day, a suicide asks to meet with him. They knew it was about to happen. But why?
A man hires you to investigate his wife’s recent suicide. He is convinced that his wife may still be alive.
As an expert in psychology, you could get anybody’s confessions and don’t doubt your own intuition. However, you couldn’t save yourself from committing a murder.
A hitman who enjoys killing is forced to kill against his wishes. He sees ghosts. When arrested he insists that it has to be a setup meant to get him to change sides and kill for them if he wants to stop the ghosts.
A detective begins an investigation but finds vampires sucking the victims in the search.
A scientist researching cognitive dissonance accidentally kills his own son, due to an experiment gone wrong. Externally, he appears to be a grieving parent but deep down inside he actually rejoices.
The town sheriff has just been murdered. Then one person from each generations of your family is murdered as well. All seems to be pointing to you, the newest family member. Is it a coincidence? Does one of your relatives want to kill off the rest of your family? You take the secret to your grave.
You are just a significant witness to a brutal murder. However, the jury finds you guilty of first-degree murder rather than innocent.
An intelligence agency summons you to be part of a project to ensure that you are midway between reality and fantasy constantly. You are permitted one out of imagination idea at the end of each period to be part of the real world. You volunteer.
John the Burglar is slipping a diamond ring out of a safe when he hears a voice from a vent.
Your brother in law is a serial killer they all say he is, but you never believed it. He confesses in a sealed document you would only know about in the event of his death to convince you he is innocent.
1. It’s tough being a Romance writer with the name… Fill in the blank.
You retired 8 years ago but a childhood friend of yours disappears without a trace. You are convinced they were murdered so you travel through the USA to find their body. But why are you the only one you have to do it?
The media has been having it’s fun with a staged demonic possession. Caught, the supposed “possessed person” is interviewed, only to reveal a whole second story to his madness.
After defeating a galactic villain your space explorer boyfriend and his weird robot friend ask you to marry them.
A mysterious stranger appears in your dreams to tell you the secret to everything. You can’t write it or tell anyone about it.
A man crashes during a small plane trip. He gets up and walkes for 3 days to get help. When somebody helps him and asks where his plane has gone, he says that he’s never been in a plane in his life.
A serial killer changes his MO every five years. There has never been a pattern and he has never communicated with the police at all. Everyone is shocked when they learn the killer’s true reason for his crime spree.
Did you ever wish you could go back 20 years in time, knowing what you know now?
You’re walking home late one night. You spot a girl crying and running down the sidewalk toward you. She doesn’t notice you. You might have seen something, you might have heard something, you might have seen the whole thing.
Somebody has just paid you to find their missing loved one. You are pretty sure there is more to the story that they are keeping from you.
A teenager is stabbed to death. The specific way he is stabbed attracts the press. The method he is stabbed with closely resembles artwork that has been appearing around the city.
The one firm you never want to work for is proposing you as captain of their security team this Christmas. Do you take the job?
You work as private eye and take a case from a nun who wants to hire you to help her convent. What you don’t know yet is that the convent appears to be a cover for a murder conspiracy.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. But is the truth really that simple?
You are on vacation when you stumble into a murder. Or was it fate?
You were hired to find the rightful heirs to an artifact your client purchased from a pawn shop.
As a teenager you become addicted to designer drugs. When you reach 26, a friend of yours gives you his last standing supply and in a last, good goodbye tries to force you to overdose. Your old friend dies of an overdose as well but you survive. You drop off the heroin like this and you get free of the addiction until your friend’s ghost hunts you.
A famous actress has turned to your agency seeking advice and information on someone with an interest in her.
Science and religion have failed us in explaining what the “afterlife” is. You have a theory. You are determined to share it with others. You find another want to hear it. He is interesting and mysterious. You find yourself setting up a place to meet him when you go out to preach.
You spot a young model holding a very large bundle of cash at an art gallery. Investigating, you discover that the cash is counterfeit, and the model is part of a counterfeiting operation. Something about her seems familiar, almost friendly.
A scientist at work discovers an abnormal growth of fungi in the work basement.
A friend you have not spoken to in years contacted you, for the first time, days before his murder.
The police are after you. Just when you evade them, you find out that the mastermind behind this is a police inspector.
The only person that knows that you are a serial killer is your psychiatrist. Because you constantly go to him and he gives you advice on killing, you never get caught.
You just lost your wife to a gang war in the streets of LA. Desperate, you attempt the ultimate suicide mission and go undercover for the mob as a gun-running gang member. All goes well until you start to wander away from your script.
A day after your birth your father went fishing and only ever returned with your mother’s dead body. 18 years later as your father approaches his last days, you go to the lake where he claims to have caught that fateful fish.
A famous painter has recently died and was quite insane in his last years. Yet, now some items are going missing from his house. Your uncle died insane, surrounded by fantastic paintings. Could it be that the paintings have gained their own lifes?
You are on a beach, figuring out what to do with your life. That’s when you discover a human skull.
A nude body of a young girl is found in front of your home. You had expected a quiet night in.
The youngest suspect in the murder investigation is a 10 year old boy. You must interview him in order to extrapolate clues and evidence for the detective heading the investigation.
When a little girl is abducted from her room the kidnapper phones the father using the child’s new doll and tells him he better get $10million within 24 hours. Only thing is, the father is the worst detective alive, and has absolutely no idea how to begin to track the little girl down in time.
A man gets stabbed in the heart at a seemingly deserted location. There is no one around and yet two eyewitnesses testify that they saw the killer.
A sister mysteriously disappears from home one evening and is discovered in the freezing cold, barely alive and with no shoes — and if it wasn’t for the dog bringing it to your attention, the police would have never known. The calls begin the next day…
You are the only witness to a murder. The cop that turns up to take your report is the murderer.
A disgruntled, recently fired detective turns a wedding between two lovebirds into a tragedy.
The husband in the case you are working on is more complicated than he let on. You go to both his and the wife’s house on the same day. When you arrive at the husband’s house you notice that everything is in order but the dog. Upon entering the house the dog screams and attacks you. You then leave to go to the neighbors to call for help but every resident refuses to let you in.
Long before she had health issues, your wife was once a low-level spy in the colony she came from. When she had to return back to Earth, she received the order that she wasn’t allowed to tell other human beings about her job. And the fact that she was replaced. She came to you with this revelation.
You wake up one day in a hotel room to find your spouse lying next to you dead, clutching a Bible.
After years of suffering from tinnitus, hearing loss and other weird problems, you are fired from your day job. Following that you realize that your symptoms stopped as soon as your boss became your ex-boss.
The police have captured the serial jewel thief who stole the ‘Impossible Diamond’ years ago. In a witness protection program the jewel thief thinks of a story that will fool everyone.
When you were a child you were haunted by a red eyed demon. You aren’t crazy when it follows you to adulthood.
The story takes place in an alternate Earth in which there is no modern technology. The main character encounters an underground civilization with troglodytes and uses his iPhone to record it.
Extra points if it turns out your daughter had amnesia and you had been raising her for all these years.
Every single member of a cult was found dead of unnatural causes. You are hired as defense council for the leader, who is willing to defend himself. He denies any wrongdoing, despite mounting evidence.
You are a private investigator. A rather close friend of yours doesn’t answer the phone and hasn’t been seen for awhile. You visit his office and find him gone along with an extremely large stack of cash. Now you are on a race to find your friend and return his funds.
10 years ago a woman fell into a coma and never woke up. You’re her husband. You love her. But you’ve finally decided you’re going to kill her.
You and another colleague skip work together to test out your yacht when you find 2 survivors from a ship that sank. 1 is dead and who killed him?
You take private investigating as a side job to pay your rent. Except it is more than a side job. It’s two side jobs for the price of one.
You find a corpse floating in the sea covered in runes.
An old weather worn house sits on a quiet street. The owner is a hermit who hasn’t been seen in 10 years. A cold case detective approaches you with the suspicion that your client is responsible for two missing children found dead years ago and buried under his basement. Disturbingly, he was found with curls of red hair, similar to the hair color of the victims, on his clothing which lines that he has had within his basement in the last few months.
You get killed. You can now see from the afterlife. You are not happy with your killer’s ineptness and opt to make sure she gets the rightful punishment in this life, not the next.
You’re an agent sent into a foreign nation to find a person and bring him back to justice. However, at the same time he was working as a spy in your nation. Already knowing you weren’t who you said you were, he’s ready to take the fight to you.
You’ve lived all your life as an orphan. Rented shacks, welfare, barely enough to get by. The day of your 99th birthday, you turn up one million in a bank account with your name on it.
You get a call from the hospital that a patient requires your expertise. He turns out to be one of the greatest criminals of all time. What are his secrets?
A thief takes the idea of stealing something from someone else. However, he does not only steal, he steals something that the person truly loved, they have spent a lot of time with. Also, the killer is aware of the victim’s death.
It’s Shakey’s best idea in a while. He won’t be going to jail for it. Yet, that’s not the plan’s best part.
At the morgue, you witness a witch turn one of the dead bodies into a zombie. She then tells you the zombie is your sister. You also slowly realize she’s lying.
You’re sitting in a plain black chair surrounded by plain white walls, you’re completely undetectable to outside influences. There’s a sink, toilet and pitcher of water. Nothing else. Yet the door in front of you has a red button next to it. No instructions other than keep pressing the red button when the door opens.
Someone calls you and asks for your help. Their life is literally at stake. No, seriously their life is at stake. They are going to be murdered tonight if you don’t help them out. And they’ll be killed by a supernatural force.
Two weeks away from retirement, your last case turns out to be the missing person you were hoping you would be solving all those years.
Your best friend Rene is MIA for 3 years… after indexing a dozen case files. She calls out of the blue and needs your help. Can you trust her?

Conclusion

That’s it for this list of writing prompts and ideas. Feel free to use them as you wish. They can surely inspire you to create your next mystery story.

Remember though that these prompts and ideas are only here to serve as your inspiration. The way you incorporate them in your story will ultimately decide your success. Prepare, brainstorm, outline, and write your heart out, and in no time you will have your own mystery masterpiece.

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