Long before Mr. Body met his untimely demise in the library (or was it the parlor? With the knife or the candlestick?), games and murder went hand in hand. Add in the passion people have for their sports teams and the millions of dollars that change hand over betting applications, and you’ll quickly realize that sports, games, and murder go together like hot dogs, peanuts, and baseball.
Setting us up for a summer of explosive reading, these five authors have each used gaming elements to define their characters and reveal the games people play when they think no one is looking.
Crime
In Bryan Gruley’s Bitterfrost (April 1, 2025), The main character is a former hockey star who quits the sport after nearly killing an opponent thirteen years ago—but when he’s arrested for a brutal double murder that he has no memory of committing, questions about his ability to take a life surface. Will this case go cold as ice?
Cozy
In Kelly Mullen’s This Is Not a Game (April 8, 2025) two women with a generation between them—a grandmother and her video game designer granddaughter—set out to catch a murderer before they get caught in a web themselves. I’m guessing a reboot of the system isn’t going to solve their problems.
Mystery
In Diego Boneta’s The Undoing of Alejandro Valesco (May 1, 2025), a tennis player gets pulled into the exciting—and mysterious—lives of his now-deceased best friend’s powerful family. The score may start out at love, but playing with stakes like these leads can be deadly. Game! Set! March!
Mystery
Tory Eldridge’s Kaua’i Storm (May 20, 2025) follows a park ranger who returns to Hawaii for a birthday celebration, but it’s no party game when her cousins–a college football player and a teenager—go missing. Before you can say “aloha,” things turn deadly.
Mystery
In Topper Jones’s Oceano Beach Bedlam (March 17, 2025), it’s a mix of surfing, martial arts, and exotic dancing that informs this private investigator mystery set—where else? —in California. The surf may be up, but the crimes are low-down and dirty.
Whether you’re drawn to the puzzle aspect of a mystery, the strategic set-up and reveal, or the underlying motivations that push a person to attempt the perfect crime, you’ll find characters who treat that crime like a game. The next time you start keeping score while reading, remember they don’t call it “sudden death overtime” for nothing.
