Books Like Murdle: 8 Murder Mystery Puzzle Books to Solve Next

What made Murdle such a phenomenon?

Murdle arrived from G. T. Karber’s daily online mystery game and did one thing brilliantly: it handed you a murder, a grid of suspects, weapons and rooms, and a stack of clues, and let you name the killer yourself. Join Deductive Logico, rule out the impossible, and whoever is left did it. It sold in the millions and pulled a whole genre up behind it. Since the first volume, a flood of solve-it-yourself murder mystery puzzle books has followed, which is good news once you have worked through every case and still want more. The only real question is which one fits what you loved. Here are eight, sorted by taste, from the closest cousins to the ones that go somewhere new.

Murdoku, for the pure logic grid

If what hooked you was the deduction grid itself, Murdoku by M. Garand strips it to the bone. It crosses Cluedo with Sudoku: each of its eighty crime scenes, from a bakery to a casino to a chess tournament, is a small grid where you place the suspects until only one of them could have been standing over the body. There is no running story, just the clean satisfaction of the logic, and the difficulty climbs steadily across the book. It was featured in the Financial Times, and the second volume runs the same idea through five different historical eras.

The Cosy Mystery Puzzle Book, for a quiet evening

For something lighter and warmer, the Cosy Mystery Puzzle Book series from Richardson Puzzles and Games wraps around ninety puzzles into a single case, mixing visual clues, codes, logic and word puzzles that you solve to catch the culprit. It is easy to pick up and put down without losing the thread, which makes it the one to reach for when you want a mystery to unwind with rather than wrestle. Think of it as the cozy-crime end of the shelf.

Murder Most Puzzling, for the artwork

Murder Most Puzzling by Stephanie von Reiswitz is the most beautiful book on this list. You play the faithful sidekick to an amateur detective across a series of witty, richly illustrated cases, poring over the art for clues as much as the text. It is a book you sit with rather than race through, and Agatha Christie fans tend to feel immediately at home in its slightly macabre, opulent world.

Death in Paradise: The Puzzle Book, for the cozy-TV crowd

If you know the long-running series set on the island of Saint Marie, this one will feel like slipping into a favourite chair. You take the role of the Detective Inspector, newly arrived and handed a stack of cold cases, and work through one hundred and fifty puzzles to close them. It is sunny, familiar and generous with its clues, a gentle bridge between watching a mystery and solving one.

The GCHQ Puzzle Book, for serious codebreakers

Compiled by the puzzle-setters at GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, this is a genuine workout in ciphers, codes and lateral thinking. It is harder and drier than Murdle, with far less story, but it is also the closest most books come to real cryptography. If the coded clues were the part you wanted more of, this is the natural next step, and it pairs well with learning to break ciphers by hand.

Cain’s Jawbone, for the ultimate challenge

First published in 1934, Cain’s Jawbone by E. Powys Mathers is the legend of the genre. Its one hundred pages were printed deliberately in the wrong order, and your task is to rearrange them into the single correct sequence, uncovering six murders as you go. The number of possible orderings runs into the millions, and in nearly a century only a handful of people have ever solved it. This is not a book for a casual evening; it is the Everest that serious solvers spend months on.

The Appeal, for story over grids

Janice Hallett’s The Appeal tells a murder mystery entirely through emails, letters and messages, which you read like a detective assembling a case file from the paper trail. There is no grid and no cipher here, only the documents and your own judgement about who is lying and why. For readers who loved the investigation but want it to feel like a novel, it is the perfect gateway into interactive mysteries.

Murdcrypt: Dossier 01, for breaking real codes

Full disclosure: this one is ours, and it earns its place by doing something none of the others do. Where Murdle asks you to deduce, Murdcrypt asks you to decode. Each of its thirty cases gives you five suspects and five alibis, but every alibi is encrypted, and you take nothing on faith. To catch the killer, you have to break the cipher first. The difficulty climbs across four tiers built on ten real historical ciphers, from a simple Caesar shift up to the nomenclator that condemned Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587. If you always wished you could be the codebreaker rather than just the detective, this is the one, and there is a free case to try every day.

So which should you start with?

Follow what you loved most about Murdle. For more of the pure grid, take Murdoku. For a gentle, cozy evening, the Cosy Mystery Puzzle Book or Death in Paradise. For sheer beauty, Murder Most Puzzling. For a genuine fight that lasts weeks, Cain’s Jawbone. For a story you read rather than solve, The Appeal. And if the coded clues were the part that made your pulse jump, the GCHQ book or Murdcrypt will scratch that itch, one broken cipher at a time.