A very popular sub-genre of Mystery Fiction in recent years is stories featuring "Senior Sleuths" -- men or women who have retired from their life's regular lines of work only to take up crime solving. For the most part, the crimes tend to be murders, and the first case the Senior Sleuth must solve is usually the death of someone close to them -- a relative, a friend or a co-worker/former co-worker. Often, the sleuth's former profession leads them logically into their pursuits -- they are an ex-cop, a retired lawyer, a former investigative reporter or a mystery writer (think Jessica Fletcher on tv's Murder, She Wrote). However, just as often, their former career may have had nothing to do with the field of crime and/or criminal investigation. Many "Senior Sleuth" books could easily be classified as "Cozies" -- mystery novels with minimal violence (the killings all occur "off-stage"), often with quite a bit of humorous dialogue and solutions that challenge the reader to solve the crime along with the sleuth.

The hotlinks in the list below will mostly connect you to only the "series" books by the listed authors. However, a few of the links will connect to an author's entire body of work (or at least those owned by Lincoln City Libraries). Please keep this in mind, and double-check individual titles to make sure they are part of the series you are interested in. Finally, Lincoln City Libraries owns several non-series Senior Sleuth mysteries. You can see these, mixed in with dozens of "series" volumes, if you do a subject search under Mysteries -- Senior Sleuths in our on-line catalog.

see also Isaac Asimov, Senior Sleuths: A Large Print Anthology of Mysteries and Puzzlers, LT 813.08 Asi

Based on the concept of an original print booklist published in 1998 gb/bwc/mg
Updated and expanded for the web Mar 2004 sdc

Interested in other mystery books? You might want to sign up for the Mystery Book Club at our On-Line Book Clubs page, or take a look at our other mystery-themed lists on our booklists page.