15 Supernatural Mystery Books That Are Great Detective Stories

These fifteen supernatural mystery books combine paranormal danger with genuine detective work: crimes to solve, clues to follow, and investigators trying to make sense of the impossible.

Table of Contents

15 Books at a Glance

Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot (Rivers of London) — PC Peter Grant investigates a murder with a ghostly witness and a dangerous revenant.
Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters — Detroit detective Gabriella Versado pursues a killer whose crimes take a demonic turn.
John Connolly, A Book of Bones — Private investigator Charlie Parker hunts an immortal fanatic with an occult plan.
Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman — Natalie and her imagined noir detective inhabit an increasingly uncanny reality.
Stephen King, Later — A boy who speaks with the dead becomes a reluctant supernatural sleuth.
Caroline Kepnes, Providence — Detective “Eggs” DeBenedictus investigates inexplicable deaths linked to a transformed young man.
Alex North, The Whisper Man — Detective Inspector Pete Willis confronts an old child-murder case and ghostly whispers.
Terri Reid, Loose Ends — Private investigator Mary O’Reilly combines police work with the ability to question ghosts.
Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel — Two amateur detectives investigate murders and disappearances at a haunted motel.
Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water — Investigators aboard a seventeenth-century ship confront crimes blamed on a demon.
Simone St. James, Murder Road — A newlywed couple investigates decades of roadside murders and the ghost tied to them.
John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness — Charlie Parker enters a Maine murder case in which the dead refuse to stay silent.
Ben Aaronovitch, Winter’s Gifts — An FBI agent follows a suspicious death into something ancient in snowbound Wisconsin.
Kirsten Miller, The Change — Three women use strange new powers to investigate murders the police ignored.
T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones — An entomologist investigates the sinister changes in her mother and their family home.

This guide expands my 2021 article for Mystery & Suspense, “Supernatural Detectives: Ten Supernatural Thrillers That Are Also Great Detective Stories,” with five books published since 2021. At the end, I also include a paranormal detective story of my own. For more on crime fiction, see my post Hard-Boiled Detectives: Unveiling Detective Fiction’s Thrilling Dark Influence.

Any good mystery draws the reader into a sinister puzzle (usually involving murder) while keeping us unsure about the solution until the very end. A fictional detective is a perfect guide for this journey.

Detectives use reason and logic when identifying suspects, examining evidence, and working out guilt. Traditionally, they rely on evidence and a strict appreciation for the laws of nature. Sherlock Holmes famously embodies these qualities, but Edgar Allan Poe established the prototype with C. Auguste Dupin, the brainy investigator who first appeared in the 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The original emphasis on rational thinking resulted in a strong bias against the fantastic in detective literature for many years. In 1929, Father Ronald Knox, an influential British critic, declared that “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course,” enshrining the statement as one of his Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.

This is, of course, silly. Mixing a detective in with the supernatural illuminates the limits of brainpower to understand the unsettling—and often eerily unknowable—aspects of life that we all fear. Not everything that fascinates and terrifies yields easily to logic.

And yet who better than a gritty detective to grapple with a mystery involving supernatural forces? Regardless of the spooky complications, the detective’s job is the same: figure out the puzzle. Setting the conundrum inside a paranormal thriller boosts chills and excitement while offering the reader profound relief when a demonic, not-of-this-world danger is exposed and defeated.

Below are ten popular supernatural mystery books featuring detectives who grapple with the uncanny, followed by five newer favorites. I also add one of my own at the end as a bonus.

What Makes a Supernatural Thriller a Great Detective Story?

The best supernatural thrillers never stop being mysteries. Strip away the ghosts, the visions, and the things that go bump in the night, and you are still left with a detective story: a crime to solve, a trail of clues, and an investigator reasoning toward the truth. What the paranormal adds is a second set of rules — a world where the impossible counts as evidence, and where the suspense comes as much from what the detective cannot explain as from what they can.

That blend of mystery and the paranormal is what ties together the ten supernatural mystery books below. Each is a genuine whodunit — or whydunit — that happens to be haunted. Whether you like your paranormal suspense eerie and atmospheric or your supernatural detective stories grounded in hard-nosed investigation, there is something here to keep you guessing.

Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot (originally: Rivers of London)

This clever book features Peter Grant, a London cop just out of training and slotted for a boring desk job. Everything changes when he finds a ghost who witnessed a gruesome murder.

That encounter leads Grant to join a secret Scotland Yard unit that uses magic to contain mythical forces, including various river deities such as Father Thames and his rival, Mama Thames. More worrisome is the revenant, a vicious spirit that uses innocent people to reenact the story of Punch and Judy to murderous effect.

While young and inexperienced, Grant quickly proves himself a deft investigator equally at ease in gathering evidence from humans, ghosts, water nymphs, and other bizarre beings that defy easy description. His mentor teaches him the magic needed to track down the revenant and bring it to supernatural justice.

Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters

This novel is extraordinary on many levels, not the least of which is its ability to horrify and amuse simultaneously. It opens with the discovery of a body. Or rather, two bodies: the head and torso of a kidnapped boy with the bottom half of a deer.

The crime is an act of malevolent inspiration kindled in part by the setting in contemporary Detroit, a place so decayed and forlorn that it draws hipster disaster tourists. Police detective Gabriella Versado doggedly hunts for the killer using shoe leather and a keen eye for the bizarre.

Along the way, she must deal with Layla, her cyber-stalking daughter; Jonno, a failed New York writer (his try at “a post-post-modern Moby-Dick” fizzled) turned parasitic “citizen journalist”; and Clayton, an artist dramatically out of step with the local art scene. Everything crashes together in a hallucinogenic finale as Detective Versado saves the world from a demonic live stream.

John Connolly, A Book of Bones: A Thriller

Connolly aggressively repudiates Father Knox’s admonition against employing the supernatural in detective fiction. A Book of Bones is the seventeenth in a series featuring ex-cop Charlie Parker, who is human but specializes in occult private investigations.

This story involves “a transcontinental hunt for an apocalyptic fanatic” named Quayle, a man unable to die. Quayle is preparing a special book of Grimm’s fairy tales that will end the world. Out to stop him is Parker, an old-school detective, gruff, bruised, and determined.

Our hero has lots of first-hand experience investigating bad guys and gals, including those of the aggressively non-human variety. The more we learn about Quayle and his dark plot, the more we take heart in the declaration, “Parker fears no evil. But evil fears him.”

Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

Seventeen-year-old Natalie is a wallflower with a problem. Her father, a minor writer, is a pompous bully who has pushed her into a state of repression so extreme her grasp of reality falters.

Early in the novel, Natalie hears the voice of a noir detective grilling her about a murder. Later, she imagines the detective finding her next to her father’s corpse, “her face white and distorted with screaming. She would be unable to account for the blood on her hands, on the front of her dress, on her shoes, the blood soaking through the carpet at her feet, the blood under her hand on the desk.” She has slipped into an uncanny reality where she is both the killer and the detective who ensures her punishment.

Metaphorically, this is true. Natalie in a sense does kill her father when she leaves him for college and falls under the smarmy influence of a mediocre English teacher and his wretched wife. College life, with its poisonous cliques and isolating atmosphere, punishes Natalie terribly, pushing her so deep into madness that both she and the reader are unsure what is real.

The story ends with Natalie abruptly casting off her problems. “As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.” But despite the words, some might draw a different conclusion.

Stephen King, Later

Two detectives, an amateur and a professional, are at odds here. The amateur is Jamie, who discovers at age eight that he can see and speak with dead people.

Various adults compel Jamie to interrogate ghosts for their own selfish ends. This results in one particularly bad spirit who won’t leave him alone. Jamie turns reluctant sleuth to solve the mystery of his haunting, and what he learns leads to a riveting confrontation with the supernatural in which he prevails. Good triumphing over evil? Almost but not quite.

The pro detective is Liz, a corrupt New York cop. Liz manipulates the boy to help prevent a terrible crime and, later as a desperate addict, to track down a drug kingpin’s stash. This goes badly wrong, forcing Jamie to rely on the unnatural wickedness he hoped to banish forever.

Caroline Kepnes, Providence: A Novel

Detective “Eggs” DeBenedictus is sure that someone is responsible for the heart attack deaths of several young people in his town. Like all good sleuths, Eggs relies on his gut even though there is no evidence of foul play.

His investigation leads to Jon, a young man who disappeared years before on his way to school. It seems a teacher/evil scientist kidnapped Jon and turned him into a muscular guy who inadvertently causes sickness and death through emotional connection. Also on the trail is Chloe, Jon’s former BFF who must choose between love and safety in her dealings with a sensitive boy who has turned into a monster.

Eggs’s diligence pays off when he finds Jon and delivers what he hopes is the kind of justice appropriate for this particular unearthly circumstance.

Alex North, The Whisper Man: A Novel

Somebody is whispering to Jake, a socially isolated seven-year-old who channels spirits and has a prescient imaginary friend. Is the whisperer the same person who recently abducted and killed another child? Could it be the Whisper Man, who killed five other kids twenty years ago?

Detective Inspector Pete Willis worked the Whisper Man case and never recovered emotionally from the experience. Through a series of improbable (magical?) circumstances, Pete becomes key to solving the mystery.

Investigative help comes from Jake’s father and an intrepid female journalist. The whodunit plot is overlaid with a mystical exploration of father-son bonds.

Terri Reid, Loose Ends

“Dying is what changed Mary O’Reilly’s life. Well, actually, coming back from the dead and having the ability to communicate with ghosts is really what did it.”

Mary is an ex-Chicago cop working as a private investigator in rural Illinois. While she can interrogate ghosts, she also must rely on her skill as a detective to get real evidence because “a ghost’s word just doesn’t hold up in court.” She needs to draw on both skills to solve the case of a young woman who drowned in a politician’s swimming pool twenty-four years ago.

Along the way, Mary gets pulled into the unsolved disappearance of five girls from the same time as the drowning. She mixes old-fashioned gumshoe work with ghost quizzing—along with some incidental time travel—to ensure justice prevails.

Simone St. James, The Sun Down Motel

This supernatural thriller features two amateur detectives investigating crimes in the same place, thirty-five years apart. During the 1980s, Viv wants to go to the city but ends up working at the seedy Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York.

The joint is mostly deserted, but she senses creepy things. She soon gets drawn into investigating the town’s dark mystery: the unsolved murders of local young women. Then Viv herself disappears without a trace.

Enter niece Carly thirty-five years later, intent on learning what happened to her aunt. Carly gets a job at the same motel to pursue her inquiry and, like Viv, quickly realizes that vengeful ghosts haunt the place. The plot moves effectively between the two sleuths as they gather facts thirty-five years apart while ghostly peril closes in on both.

Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water

This ingenious book mashes up the horror, suspense, and detective genres.

The story is set during the seventeenth century on a Dutch East India Company ship. Onboard is Samuel Pipps, “the world’s greatest detective,” who happens to be locked away in irons at the command of the ranking Company official. As the voyage gets underway, so do all kinds of supernatural happenings.

With Pipps out of commission, it falls to his burly protector, Arent Hayes, to investigate. Hayes gets help from a trio of unlikely amateur sleuths: Sara, the official’s abused wife; Lia, her brilliant daughter; and Creesjie, the official’s mistress.

The more facts they gather, the more it seems clear that Old Tom, a powerful malignant force, has a terrible fate in store for the ship. Yet despite the many twists, diversions, and deceptions—not to mention a boatload of peril—the amateurs put all the pieces together in the end.

My Own Supernatural Detective Story: Murder in the Haunted Chamber

Murder in the Haunted Chamber book cover by Bill LeFurgy — *Murder in the Haunted Chamber*, book two of the Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden mysteries

Father Knox’s ban on the supernatural was a challenge I could not resist taking up myself. My own historical mystery novels — the Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden series — are set in Baltimore in 1909 and 1910, when spiritualism was a thriving business and a séance could draw the grieving, the curious, and the con artists in equal numbers.

In Into the Suffering City, Dr. Sarah Kennecott, a brilliant young physician, teams up with Jack Harden, a damaged private detective, to solve the murder of a showgirl. The sequel, Murder in the Haunted Chamber, sends the pair straight into this list’s territory: Sarah’s dead sister foretells a murder in a dream, a medium with dangerous secrets holds Baltimore society spellbound, and the detectives must work out whether the killer operates by trickery — or by forces neither science nor gut instinct can explain.

For more detective fiction with a dark streak, see my guide to hard-boiled detectives.

This post is based on my article “Supernatural Detectives: Ten Supernatural Thrillers That Are Also Great Detective Stories,” originally published in Mystery & Suspense in 2021.