Books · Mystery

A personalized mystery novel, written for you.

A mystery only works if the solution was planned before the first clue. StoryStepper plans the whole book first: who did it, what each witness hides, and where every clue lands. Then it writes the novel in one sitting and checks it for continuity.

Below is a real mystery written with StoryStepper: the brief it started from, and the book that came back.

The brief

Shape: A mystery
Ending: Both at once
Feel: dry, methodical, cynical about motive and precise about fact
Language: English
Who and what it is about: A private investigator hired to find a missing gallery assistant is given two accounts of the woman's last evening that agree on every detail except one: the order in which two phone calls were made. The people who benefit from each version are not the same, and the physical evidence in the flat quietly supports a third sequence neither of them described.

The book that came back

The Order of the Calls

When gallery clerk Clara Mercer vanishes, meticulous investigator Peter Miller finds her last movements disputed—and two men offering incompatible accounts of her calls. The truth may lie in the smallest details.

Delivered in 13 minutes
16,843 words
16 chapters

Contents

The Retention of Inquiries
The Cork Street Statement
The Cold Element
The Untouched Threshold
The Cheyne Walk Account
The Itemized Ledger
The Restorer's Bench
The Bermondsey Sector
The Offer on Cheyne Walk
The Frequency of the Fan
The Ledger and the Solvent
The Counterfoil Receipt
The Acoustic Signature
The Solvent on the Parchment
The Solution in Arch 412
Epilogue

From chapter one

At nine minutes past nine, Helen Mercer sat in the visitor’s chair without unbuttoning her coat.

The coat was dark blue wool, thin at the cuffs, the fabric damp across the shoulders from the mist hanging over Kennington Road. She had laid a maroon plastic NHS staff lanyard across her knees, folding the laminated identity card inward so the photograph was obscured. Her palms pressed flat against the skirt of her coat, the fingers rigid, resting just behind the kneecaps.

"The police took the missing person form at Lewisham," she said. Her voice had the flat, clipped cadence of someone reading from a chart in a ward corridor. "They told me seventy-two hours is standard for an adult woman with independent tenancies. They said young women from galleries frequently go to the Continent without informing their relatives."

Miller did not answer. He aligned his two pencils—hard graphite, sharpened that morning with an engineer’s scalpel—parallel to the margin of his ruled pad. Between them lay the small grey cardboard box containing an index card dated 1997, inscribed with the single name David Ward and a four-digit registry number from the Lewes Crown Court custody register. It remained in the top right drawer, four inches open.

"She does not go to the Continent," Helen Mercer said. "She has nineteen pounds in her current account. Her rent is six hundred and fifty pounds a month, due on the twentieth, and she owes two quarterly installments on a personal loan from a firm in Croydon. When she left our parents’ house she promised me she would never leave an invoice unpaid."

"When was she last seen?" Miller asked.

A real book from the StoryStepper library, written from this brief.

Get a whole book

$2.99 your first month: two books like this a month, written for you.

How a book is made →Pricing →