Musing Monday...It's a Mystery!

Can MizB at Should Be Reading possibly have come up with another Musing MOnday question this week? I bet she has...

What kind of books do you like to read?

Why? Provide specific examples.

Oh, such a difficult question.
How can I possibly answer this one?

Ok, I am just fooling around.
Just glance around at my last few reviews and I think you may figure the answer out.

Yes, I am a fan of mysteries.
A hopeless, over the top follower of the who-done-it in all it’s various forms. I like thrillers and police procedurals, noir and cozies, crime and psychological..I like them all. I like series and stand-alones, classic and contemporary..yep, I like them all.

Now I have tried to expand my genres, especially since I started the wee blog, and to some limited degree I have succeeded. Really! I went from 100% mysteries to maybe 90%. :-)
I read a bit of YA fiction, something I did not read when I was a YA since I was reading mysteries, and I read some of what might be called literary fiction, a name I always find rather odd. What, as opposed to non-literary fiction? But nevertheless, I read some. I have always read a bit of science fiction and have added some dystopian books in the last few years..even though they tend to depress me, and I have long enjoyed a bit of horror, at least the not too horrible horror of Dean Koontz.
But push come to shove, the one genre I always return to are mysteries.

They are my comfort read. Which is, I admit, rather odd.
Give me death and mayhem, violence and crime and I am relaxed and happy and enthralled. Why?

my childhood public library branch, Newark, NJ

Well, I wrote about this once before. What I concluded is that I think I and many readers are attracted to mysteries because, for all the bad things that may happen in one, they paint a world where there is order and goodness. Yes, there is a battle between good and evil and yes, it is not all black and white but rather filled with shades of gray but the mystery will be solved and truth will be revealed and order will be restored. If not perfectly, at least to some degree. Even in an imperfect world, people who do bad things will be punished.

And maybe best of all, we the readers get to play along, exercise our brain, and see if we can figure it out too. In a good mystery, what I consider a 'fair' mystery, we, the reader, will have the facts to solve it and will usually fail. And hopefully be amazed that once again a little sleight of hand led us to the wrong conclusions. Great fun.

Examples? Oh, where could I possibly start? There are so many author I love. Slaughter comes to mind as a favorite series and Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island Quartet is another. Laurie R. Kings' Martinelli books are very good, and I loved Cody McFadyen books...he is very, very creepy. And speaking of creepy, let me just mention Mr. Koontz again. He has written a huge number of books and while some of them are just good, many of them are really excellent.
And hey, they are not even mysteries!

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