Off the Beaten Path Mystery Books

Twelve people arrive at a remote inn to spend the weekend. After dark, the doors and windows are locked, the lights go out, and someone starts murdering the guests. Is the murderer one of the twelve or someone else? Each guest must decide whether he or she should form a bond with any of the other guests, none of whom appear to be a murderer. Those guests, chosen specifically by the murderer, include a doctor, a judge, a private detective, a kindergarten teacher, a firefighter, a mystery author, a librarian, a taxidermist, a real estate agent, an insurance agent, a funeral director, and a computer programmer. Is the murderer one of them, the butler, or the owner, who is blind and confined to a wheelchair? Or did someone else find a way to sneak into the inn?

A young woman goes missing. A woman by the same name is one of thirteen people in a photograph taken of thirteen thirteen-year-olds at a birthday party many years earlier. But is it the same woman? And has she been abducted, murdered, or left of her own volition? Soon thereafter, one-by-one, young adults who attended that birthday party as thirteen-year-olds are found murdered, and a copy of that photograph is left, with a knife stuck through the picture of the victim. Who is responsible? Is it one of the thirteen? The missing woman? Or someone else jealous of the girl who had the birthday party, a girl whose dad owned the town drive-in theater and amusement park.

Castle Woods is an upscale community with a wall around it. Few people live there, and not a lot of others know that it exists. Yet one night a resident is murdered there, and another resident is missing. Did an outsider scale the twenty-foot wall, or is one of the residents murdering his or her neighbors?

A wife convinces her overworked, wealthy husband to go on a vacation and lets him pick where they go. He chooses a chalet in the Smoky Mountains. The vacation goes well until the wife receives a phone call from a stranger.