Kids' Book Lists: Mystery & Suspense

The school play is about honest Abe Lincoln, but someone has been less than honest with the admission money. Can Cam, with the click of her photographic memory, find the missing money before the thief makes his getaway?

While searching for his mysteriously lost human family, Buddy the dog is adopted by another family and helps solve the mystery of their missing boy.

Assisted by her cat Max, sixth grader Minnie starts up her new detective agency by investigating a kidnapping and a thief who will steal anything, even a hot stove.

When the behavior of the neighborhood bully changes radically for the better, Willie & his friends think he might be under the control of extraterrestrials.

Third-grader Harry thinks of a way to patch up a conflict with his schoolmate Mary and include his friends in a fun detective case with rewards for everyone, including Grandpa.

On a whale watch, Meg tries to solve a puzzling case involving a stolen treasure map. The reader is asked to solve the mystery before Meg, using clues found in the text and illustrations.

Jill and Gwen are excited about the pet talent show coming up at their school. The problem is, Fletcher's talents are pretty much limited to eating salami and sleeping, until he hears Elvis! Things start to go wrong the first day. It looks like someone doesn't want Fletcher on stage.

Ruth Rose, Josh, and Dink attend a concert during which someone steals the star's diamond pendant, and they are soon on the trail of the thief.

Nate the Great solves the mystery of the missing picture.

Asked by a Swiss banker to investigate a series of bank robberies committed by dogs, young detectives Max and Maddy Twist travel to Switzerland, where they discover that the man behind the robberies is none other than Professor Sardine.

The Aldens begin their adventure by making a home in a boxcar. Their goal is to stay together, and in the process they find a grandfather.

When seemingly unrelated and strange events start to happen and a precious Vermeer painting disappears, eleven-year-olds Petra and Calder combine their talents to solve an international art scandal.

When twelve-year-old Steve Brixton, a fan of Bailey Brothers detective novels, is mistaken for a real detective, he must elude librarians, police, and the mysterious Mr. E as he seeks a missing quilt containing coded information.

A boy goes to live with his magician uncle in a mansion that has a clock hidden in the walls which is ticking off the minutes until doomsday.

Puzzle-crazy, twelve-year-old Winston and his ten-year-old sister Katie find themselves involved in a dangerous mystery involving a hidden ring. Puzzles for the reader to solve are included throughout the text.

After learning that she is not the biological daughter of boring Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, Fern embarks on magical adventures with her real father and finally finds "a place that feels like home."

After Marvin, a beetle, makes a miniature drawing as an eleventh birthday gift for James, a human with whom he shares a house, the two new friends work together to help recover a Durer drawing stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When someone steals the winner's trophy for the school book project, Clarice emulates her favorite book heroine, Ruby Redfort the detective.

Charlie, a sixth-grader with a compulsion to tell lies, acquires a mysterious skull that forces its owner to tell only the truth, causing some awkward moments before he understands its power.

The robbery of the treasure in the tower proves to be an exciting challenge to Frank and Joe.

When Ted and Kat's cousin Salim disappears from the London Eye ferris wheel, the two siblings must work together--Ted with his brain that is "wired differently" and impatient Kat--to try to solve the mystery of what happened to Salim.

Her grandfather's dying words lead thirteen-year-old Theodora Tenpenny to a valuable, hidden painting she fears may be stolen, but it is her search for answers in her Greenwich Village neighborhood that brings a real treasure.

Twelve-year-old Truly Lovejoy's family moves to a small town to take over a bookstore. Soon, she has to solve two mysteries involving a missing book and an undelivered letter.

A father and son detective team investigates the mystery surrounding a book that that makes its readers commit terrible crimes, and a sinister organization known as the Combination.

Twelve-year-old Ben Ripley leaves his public middle school to attend the CIA's highly secretive Espionage Academy, which everyone is told is an elite science school.

Thirteen-year-old Robert "Qwerty" Stevens uses the time machine he finds in his back yard to visit Thomas Edison's workshop in 1879, and there helps develop the electric light bulb, but then needs his sister's help to return to his own time.

Reluctant orphan-turned-spy Max Segredo discovers intrigue at the Merry Sunshine Orphanage and must confront an international group bent on world domination, while uncovering mysteries from his past.

It all begins when the Monroes go to see the movie Dracula. At the theater, Toby finds something on his seat -- a baby rabbit, which the family takes home and names Bunnicula. It proves to be an apt name, at least as far as Chester the cat is concerned. Well-read and observant, Chester soon decides that there is something odd about the newcomer. For one thing, he seems to have fangs. And the odd markings on his back look a bit like a cape. Furthermore, Bunnicula sleeps from sunup to sundown and is only awake at night. And then there are the vegetables ... the white vegetables. Is Bunnicula really a vampire? Only Bunnicula knows for sure.

In the late nineteenth century, Rhoda investigates a wrecker that may be luring ships to destruction on the Virginia barrier island where her father is Keeper of a U.S. Lifesaving Station. Includes historical notes on the United States Life-Saving Service.

A super-sleuth fourth grader solves the case of a neighbor's haunted toolshed.

Nancy is called in to help find a missing will. True to her reputation as a good detective, Nancy tracks down every possible lead in her quest.

Rex Tabby fights crime along with his partners, Simon Meeze and Frankie Fluff.

When their game of neighborhood spying takes a dark turn one night, pre-teen sleuths Sophie Young and Grace Yang find themselves caught in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with their bizarre guidance counselor, who may be hiding something sinister.

When eleven-year-old Juniper begins to suspect something is wrong with her mother and father, she and her friend Giles discover they have been selling their souls, pieces at a time, to a silver-tongued creature in a terrifying fairy-tale underworld.

Thirteen-year-old Nathaniel, aided by the famous magician Harry Houdini, plots to unmask a phony spirit advisor attempting to relieve the boy's great-aunt of her fortune.

In Rome in the year 79 A.D., a group of children from very different backgrounds work together to discover who beheaded a pet dog -- and why.

The ragamuffin boys known as the Baker Street Irregulars help Sherlock Holmes solve the mysterious deaths of a family of circus tightrope walkers.

Twelve-year-old Ruby Miller, movie buff and aspiring screen writer, tries to resolve the mysteries surrounding her little brother's stuffed woolly mammoth and their father's five year absence.

In 1877, in an enchantment shop on the last of the Faerie roads linking New York City to the Land of the Fey, just after twelve-year-old Oona opts to relinquish her apprenticeship to her uncle, the Wizard, and become a detective, her uncle is stabbed, testing her skills.

The mysterious death of an eccentric millionaire brings together an unlikely assortment of heirs who must uncover the circumstances of his death before they can claim their inheritance.

After the sudden death of their parents, the three Baudelaire children must depend on each other and their wits when it turns out that the distant relative who is appointed their guardian is determined to use any means necessary to get their fortune.

Thirteen-year-old Lemony Snicket begins his apprenticeship with S. Theodora Markson of the secretive V.F.D. in the tiny dot of a town called Stain'd By The Sea, where he helps investigate the theft of a statue.

Idaville's secret weapon against lawbreakers, ten-year-old Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, helps the police force solve ten new cases, the solutions to which are found in the back of the book.

Enola Holmes, much younger sister of detective Sherlock Holmes, must travel to London in disguise to unravel the disappearance of her missing mother.

Eighth-grader Franny and her friends investigate why most of the students at their exclusive boarding school are brilliant, beautiful, and perfectly behaved.

Seventh-grader Georges adjusts to moving from a house to an apartment, his father's efforts to start a new business, his mother's extra shifts as a nurse, being picked on at school, and Safer, a boy who wants his help spying on another resident of their building.

As her mother prepares to be a contestant on the 1980s television game show, "The $20,000 Pyramid," a twelve-year-old New York City girl tries to make sense of a series of mysterious notes received from an anonymous source that seems to defy the laws of time and space.

At an English boarding school in the 1930s, crime-solving friends Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells struggle to find an exciting mystery to investigate and hit pay-dirt when Hazel discovers the dead body of Miss Bell, the science teacher.

After passing a series of mind-bending tests, four children are selected to go on a secret mission that requires them to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where the only rule is that there are no rules.

A Geronimo look-a-like is going around Mouse Island pretending to be Geronimo and pulling rude and nasty tricks on the other mice to get Geronimo in trouble. But worst of all the pretender is trying to take over "The Rodent's Gazette". Geronimo has to stop the imposter, but how?

Washed ashore as a baby in tiny Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, Mo LoBeau, now eleven, and her best friend Dale turn detective when the amnesiac Colonel, owner of a café and co-parent of Mo with his cook, Miss Lana, seems implicated in a murder.

Thirteen-year-old Sammy's penchant for speaking her mind gets her in trouble when she involves herself in the investigation of a robbery at the "seedy" hotel across the street from the seniors' building where she is living with her grandmother.

Fifteen-year-old Miss Penelope Lumley, a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, is hired as governess to three young children who have been raised by wolves and must teach them to behave in a civilized manner quickly, in preparation for a Christmas ball.