A sensitive and nuanced exploration of a seldom-discussed subject by an acclaimed novelist The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing—to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey’s wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much-loved Art of series.

A murdered heiress, a missing necklace, and a train full of shifty, unusual, and suspicious characters leaves Daisy and Hazel with a new mystery to solve in this third novel of the Wells & Wong Mystery series. Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells are taking a vacation across Europe on world-famous passenger train, the Orient Express—and it’s clear that each of their fellow first-class travelers has something to hide. Even more intriguing: There’s rumor of a spy in their midst. Then, during dinner, a bloodcurdling scream comes from inside one of the cabins. When the door is broken down, a passenger is found murdered—her stunning ruby necklace gone. But the killer has vanished, as if into thin air. The Wells & Wong Detective Society is ready to crack the case—but this time, they’ve got competition.

The national bestselling hit hailed by the New York Times as a "vibrant medieval mystery...[it] outdoes the competition." In medieval Cambridge, England, Adelia, a female forensics expert, is summoned by King Henry II to investigate a series of gruesome murders that has wrongly implicated the Jewish population, yielding even more tragic results. As Adelia's investigation takes her behind the closed doors of the country's churches, the killer prepares to strike again.

At ten, painting a perfect Mona Lisa made Annie Kincaid a prodigy. A similar copy at seventeen made her a crook. Lesson learned: genuine art is priceless, and forgery gets you arrested. Now Annie puts her artistic talents to honest use as a faux finisher in San Francisco. But her past may not be painted over as well as she thought… Annie’s got bad news for her ex-boyfriend, curator Ernst Pettigrew: the snooty Brock Museum’s new fifteen-million-dollar Caravaggio painting is as fake as a three-dollar bill. And the same night Annie makes her shattering appraisal, the janitor on duty is killed—and Ernst disappears. To top it all off, a well-known art dealer has absconded with multiple Old Master drawings, leaving yet more forgeries in their places. Finding the originals—and pocketing the reward money—will get Annie’s new landlord off her back. But it could also draw her into the underworld of fakes and forgers she swore she’d left behind, starting with a close encounter with a changeable but charming art thief…

In a trance-like state, Albert walks-from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia-all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images. Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.

In Art, Mystery, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission from an odd source, the very man who brought him down, a former football referee turned art handler -- to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art. Art, Mystery utilizes the style of crime noir as a delivery system for its high-spirited satire of modern life, catching the gallery scene, footloose Euro-trash, art criticism, the very rich and middle-aged white ennui in its net while hardly pausing for breath. Tersely delivered, with a dry sense of the ridiculous, Art Mystery calmly regards the commodification of aesthetics and their subsequent price-tags as a necessary evil, a machine under which the bodies of his protagonists are rolled. The inclusion of Tile's Antonio Polliauolo files, quoting extensively from E.L. Gombritch's popular study, The Story of Art, provide the raw data of aesthetic value, while providing a framework with which to regard it whimsically. This, along with Tile's drunken deep-dive into scholarly discourse with Dr. Harmoni, give us a sense of the arcana driving the capitalist lust without breaking Thompson's headlong stride or his ability to send up human interplay and its twisted use of language. Perlat Tile, Pablo Pablon, Ms. Jasmine, Naj, Dr. Enver Harmoni and the rest of the characters of Art, Mystery are sketched definitively, but with an eye on their ambiguous, unknowable depths - the darkness of which only emerges once in a rare while. The rest of the time, Thompson's deft strokes tell us what we need to know as the stakes multiply. Art, Mystery is a strikingly breezy read and a delightful introduction to the literary voice of Mayo Thompson.