"The Unredeemed Captive" by John Demos. This is a true story, based upon the kidnapping of a Puritan girl in New England by Native Americans, who was carried off to Canada. The "mystery", in part, is why she never wished to return to her own society, even when given the chance, later on. It's a fascinating tale, well-written and well-researched.

The Lindbergh Kidnapping is perhaps one of the most fascinating and puzzling crimes ever and much has been written about it. Recently I read Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax by Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, which takes a look at the evidence and comes to a rather startling conclusion. Quite a page-turner and very readable.

Devil in the White City Erik Larson
The Coffee Trader David Liss

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale might interest you. One of the first murders to be investigated in the mid 1800's England by 'modern' means. The main short-coming of the book is that it has had to be 'padded out' but the work of the detective on the case of the murdered baby is interesting and not too gruesome.

You probably know Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Did Richard III really murder the Princes in the Tower and if not, who did it? Very readable.

I am not sure if you would be able to find Cheryl MacDonald's Who Killed George? The Ordeal of Olive Sternaman, a retelling of a sensational case of a woman who was tried twice for poisoning her second husband, and was suspected of killing the first as well. The trial occurred in the relatively small town of Cayuga, Ontario. I found it particularly fascinating as I could personally visit many of the places mentioned in the book.

Of course, the infamous slaughter of the entire Donnelly family in 1880, in rural Ontario, has spawned a number of books here in Canada. My favourite is Orlo Miller's The Donnellys Must Die.

If you are looking for murders with a royal flavor, there are several books by Anne Somerset. I have only read Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I, which was a fascinating read.

Sorry about not closing my italics.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad is a late Victorian/Edwardian dark tale based on the real events of anarchist plots in London when extremists from Europe found a 'safe haven' from where to plot and bomb.
Some things never change.

"The White Garden" by Stephanie Barron, about Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, and Sissinghurst. The premise put forth, in the form of a mystery, is what if Virginia Woolf did not drown herself, but instead disappeared for a time? I've not yet finished reading it, but it is fascinating.

Barron writes mysteries under another pen name.

Lydia, I also enjoy the based-on-real-incidents type of novels and historical true crime.

Have you read F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow? It's a novel based on the Edith Thompson-Frederick Bywaters affair in Ilford, England and the murder of Edith's abusive husband. Thompson and Bywaters were hanged in 1923.

Ernest Raymond's We, the Accused is a fictionalized telling of the Harley Hawley Crippen case. He and his disguised-as-a-boy girlfriend tried to escape to America after the disappearance of his wife, whose body parts were eventually discovered in the cellar of Crippen's London house.

Then there's Ludovic Kennedy's Ten Rillington Place, nonfiction about John Reginald Halliday Christie.

Oh, and if you can find it, Dorothy L. Sayers's analysis of the murder of Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931 is superb! It's not book-length so it's usually found in crime anthologies.

Non-murder mysteries...what about the strange case of the "Mary Celeste"? Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks is very well-written, in my opinion -- straightforward, no sensational theorizing, completely plausible.

I agree with "The Coffee Trader" from ccrdmrbks. Fantastic read.

I think you would like:

"Ghost Ship"-about the mystery of the Mary Celeste

"The Innocent Man" by John Grishman-A legal thriller

"The Franklyn Scandal"- Nick Byrant- a painful read for me based on a true story

James Ellroy writes how-it-might-have-been books about famous real life unsolved mysteries. The Black Dahlia is one, and I read another set in Honolulu, the name of which I can't remember. I believe he has written several such.

Wow, I have heard of some of these recommendations but many are completely new to me. I have lots to look for. Thank you all so much.

timallan, I have a pictorial essay by Ray Fazakas titled "The Donnelly Album: The Complete and Authentic Account of Canada's Famous Feuding Family". The book by Orlo Miller interests me. I am trying to collect books representing famous murders in each of the provinces. The only one I have for Quebec is "The Cassock and the Crown" by Jean Monet. Do you know of others? I also need New Brunswick.

I am doing the same thing for each of the States. Some are easy - California, New York, Florida and Texas are over-represented - but some like North Dakota, Maine and Delaware are elusive. I only have one for Rhode Island, "The Von Bulow Affair" and it is really too recent. So if anyone knows of any prospects, please let me know.

friedag, do you have a thing for British murders? All of the ones you listed sound very interesting. So does the Mary Celeste book.

I like books about strange natural phenomena too. Any of those come to mind?

Heh! Lydia, I suppose I do have a thing for British murders, particularly the vintage ones. I blame it on George Orwell and his essay "Decline of the English Murder." Crippen was actually an American, as was his victim; but he did his deed in London and he was nabbed by Scotland Yard, so the British get the credit for another classic.

I'm afraid I can't help you much with your provinces and states. I figure you've probably already got something about the Massie affair for Hawai'i. Peter Packer's simply titled The Massie Case remains my favorite, but the more recent Honor Killing by David Stannard is good, too (plus it has photographs).

Do you have anything about Villisca for Iowa? I checked my bookshelf and have Roy Marshall's Villisca: The True Account of the Unsolved 1912 Mass Murder that Stunned the Nation. If the murders themselves aren't strange enough, there's the legend that the murder house is haunted. Yeah, another so-called haunted house, but this one has spawned super weirdness from all the ghost hunters wanting to prove it.

Isn't there a recent novel about the real-life murder in Frank Lloyd Wright's house? I read it but the title escapes me.
Strange natural phenomena:What about The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball?

Graham Hancock's Underworld fascinates me, and the theory he explores is not preposterous (unlike some of his Egyptian stuff). He thinks there are archaeological sites submerged off the coasts of India, Japan, Malta, etc. that could hold lost stories of the progress of civilization.
If you like Elizabethan-type murders:I enjoyed the nonfiction Death and the Virgin: Elizabeth, Dudley and the Mysterious Fate of Amy Robsart by Christopher Skidmore.

And one of my all-time favorites is Anthony Burgess's novel A Dead Man in Deptford, based, of course, on the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

I would suggest reading:
"Crop Circles" by Michael Glickman. I found it fascinating.

The book set in Hawaii that I was thinking about and couldn't remember is Damned in Paradise (A Nate Heller Mystery) by Max Allan Collins. It is based on the Massie case, and he is also an author who writes other mystery fiction based on real cases.

Thanks, Frieda, and I agree with with your suggestion of A Dead Man in Deptford. I thought that one was very interesting.

Two books on my TBR pile that might interest you are:

"The Poisoner's Handbook" by Deborah Blum was recently published. It is about the first appointed medical examiner for New York City starting in the 1920s who along with the city's first toxicologist made huge advancements in investigations of poisoning. The reviews I've read have been very favorable and I'm looking forward to reading this.

"Provenance" by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo is a true story about a huge art forgery scheme and how the principal players were able to continue to pass off the forgeries. This book came out in 2009 and has also received good reviews.

Again! Many thanks for the continuing suggestions.

friedag and carolyn_ky: Actually no, I do not have anything about the Massie case for Hawaii. Thank you both. The only one I have so far in the desired time period is "Poisoned Palms: The Murder of Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford." It was always suspected that Mrs. Stanford, the "Mother" of Stanford University in California, died of strychnine poisoning in the Honolulu Palms Hotel in 1905.

The strange phenomena books sound very interesting, friedag and rosaearth.

elliottb, anything about poisonings will draw my attention. But I promise I am NOT doing research with malignant intent! :) I like art forgery and art heist stories too.

friedag, I never heard of Villisca but the summaries of those murders are definitely intriguing me. I know haunted houses are not "natural" but some supernatural things are fascinating to me.

You must be thinking of "Loving Frank," the novel about the Frank Lloyd Wright house murder. I have not read it yet, but it is in the line-up for one of my book group discussions. How would you rate it?

elliottb-Funny, I just ordered "The Poisoner's Handbook" because it sounds so fascinating to me.

I have been thinking of more books for you, lydiakatznflowers, as I looked through my shelves:

"Ghostwalk" by Rebecca Stott-Issac Newton historic mystery

"The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen-based on one of the first tabloid murders in New York

"The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" by Kate Summerscale-based on a real life Victorian murder that stunned England.

From my husband's library is a book he loved:

"Shadow Divers"-Robert Kurson-I have not read it but he was enthralled by the story-mysterious wreck from WII-true story

I would second Shadow Divers as a great read, but not a mystery per se-although there are secrets within.

Lydia, a friend told me about a novel, The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, that features the hatchet murder and assault on three women in the 1870s. The crime setting is Smutty Nose (now Smuttynose) Island, part of a group of isles that actually belong to Maine although they are only a few miles off the New Hampshire coast. I haven't read the Shreve book (that I recall), but I know I've read something about the attack on the women because "Smutty Nose" strikes a chord.

Yes, Loving Frank is the title I was trying to think of. I left out a word in my post above: I should have said that I read about it because I haven't actually read the book. Sorry about that!

The Isles of Shoals are in my neck of the woods--or ocean, I suppose. Some are in New Hampshire and some in Maine. They are most easily visited via Portsmouth NH.

The poet Celia Thaxter grew up on one of them and had a literary salon there in the late 19c. She also worked her fingers to the bone to keep the family resort going. Today she is best known for her garden book, An Island Garden, illustrated with exquisite paintings by Childe Hassam, the great American impressionist who went there in the summer.

There are several good biographies of Thaxter--no murders--but a lot of trouble in her life due to an unstable husband and mentally ill son. Another renowned American painter, Richard Morris Hunt, committed suicide on the island--Thaxter found the body. She was a resilient and creative person who had a lot to bear. "Sandpiper" is one biography of Thaxter that I read and enjoyed.

Anita Shreve is not my favorite writer, but I did like "The Weight of Water" very much and would recommend it.

I "third" the Weight of Water recommendation.

Lauren Belfer's City of Lights is a mystery/suspense novel which takes place in Buffalo, NY around 1901. While the story itself is fiction, it works in the Pan-American Expo, Grover Cleveland and the advent of electric power plants, in this case using Niagara Falls to generate power.

Another title in which the main story is fiction but the back story is historical include Ron Rash's Serena about the logging industry during the Depression and the industry's clash with feds and their National Parks plans.

This is a true story from an old Yankee magazine that has always haunted me. Although there is no violence in this story, it involves a lost child, so don't read it if that is disturbing to you.

Even now, four years later, Ron and Jill Newton will sometimes let their minds drift back and silently relive that Labor Day weekend, hour by hour, trying to snatch it all back and hold it still at 10:00 A.M. Sunday, August 31,1975.

It had been a grand weekend, camping with their children, Kimberly, age six, and Kurt, age four, and three other families from their home in Manchester, Maine. Natanis Point Campground was small and remote, its fifty-eight sites cut from a paper-company forest 1,300 feet above sea level in Chain of Ponds, a wilderness township six miles below the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. Campers fished from two ponds that were deep and cold. When a fisherman landed a salmon from the small wooden bridge below the thread of beach, he would yelp with pleasure and a crowd would gather. Mountains loomed over the ponds, and when at night a loon wailed and the forest pressed close on all sides, you knew you were away.

That Friday the Newtons arrived first. It was their first trip with the recently acquired secondhand tent trailer, what Jill called "our luxury." They gathered wood along an abandoned logging road nearly a mile from their campsite. "It isn't camping without a bonfire," Kurt said happily. On Saturday their friends arrived, and Kimberly raced her bicycle through mud puddles while Kurt furiously pedaled his big-wheel tricycle after her, trying to keep up. It was the end of a summer, and there were huge meals and laughter and quiet, chilly nights by a roaring fire. To Jill Newton things felt "just right," which was not unusual.

"We'd been married eight years," she would say later, "and everything just seemed to work right. We got along so well. We had saved for four years to buy a house, and when we were ready, there was our house across the street from the elementary school. From before we were married we always said we'd have two children and no more. We had a girl and then by a stroke of luck we had a boy, just what we wanted. It became a sort of joke between Ron and me. We'd say, 'How did we get so lucky? "

Sunday broke with a heavy mist over the ponds. Ron took the bite off the morning, using the last of the wood to light a fire. Kurt slept until nine, fighting off a cold; when he awoke he shivered. "I'm so glad Daddy built a bonfire," he said. Ron dressed Kurt for the damp, chilly morning: red jersey, navy blue sweatshirt, speckled red and black corduroys. Kurt tugged on dark brown shoes over mismatched white socks and topped off his outfit with a favorite navy blue jacket decorated with baseball emblems.

Jill called Kurt "a head-turner," a striking child with an impish sweet face, bright blue eyes, and platinum blond hair. "The loveliest, sweetest towhead kid you ever saw," said a neighbor....

I used to enjoy Yankee magazine, before they changed the format and deleted the poetry.

Was "Picnic at Hanging Rock" based upon a real life event? At any rate, it is a fascinating story, with a mysterious setting, when school girls vanished on a school picnic on Valentine's Day, in Australia, in the last century.

That was a tragic story. Heartbreaking. How do people go on after something like that?

I have gotten Yankee magazine for years and miss the long and informative stories they used to run. But there are not enough of us readers left, it appears, to make such a magazine financially viable.

I had forgotten all about City of Lights. Yes, I second that. I might even go get it from the library again.
Also looking forward to Erik Larson's newest, Thunderstruck.

Thank you all for the recommendations of "The Weight of Water." And thanks to everyone for all the other recs. Such riches...ask and ye shall receive from this group!:)

I can put a check in the column for Maine now. If anyone thinks of something for North Dakota and Delaware, let me know, please.

siobhan 1, I appreciate your posting the article from "Yankee" magazine. It is heartrending. 35 years and still no one knows? It sounds like an abduction. Maybe there is hope that Kurt could still be alive today. He would be about 39 years old now, but he was so young when whatever happened to him that he might not have any memory of it. Maybe someone's conscience will nag them to eventually tell. Stranger things have occurred.

I have harbored a notion that not many horrendous things happen in Maine. I am sad to know that it is untrue and unrealistic.

I think there are other, older unsolved child abductions. Does anyone know of them or books/novels written about them?

Many years ago, there was a mysterious abduction of a little boy, Etan Patz. There was a book written about this. I cannot recall the exact title, but you might try to google it. I think the disappearance was in New York City.

Lydia, here's one for Rhode Island: Wicked Conduct: The Minister, the Mill Girl and the Murder that Captivated Old Rhode Island (True Crime) by Rory Raven. Here's the description from goodreads:
'If I should be missing inquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol. He will know where I am.'

This scribbled note belonged to Sarah M. Cornell, written the day her body was found hanged in a rural pasture in Tiverton, Rhode Island. An unmarried young woman of limited means, Sarah was four months pregnant, and a married Methodist minister stood accused as the father. Local authorities grew skeptical of Sarah's apparent suicide as Reverend Avery's conduct appeared increasingly suspect, and eventually the extensive evidence of their tortured relationship set off a groundswell of public interest and media attention never before seen in 1830s New England. This tragic crime left the nation clamoring for justice and became one of early America's most sensational murder trials.
I haven't read it, but as soon as I saw "murder" and "Rhode Island" I thought of this thread and wanted to let you know.

Lydia,
Some more books for you...you should be busy this year;.)

"The Man who loved books too much" by Allison Hoover Bartlett, true story about book theft.

"When the Dancing Stopped" by Brian Hicks about a ship fire in 1934 off the coast of New Jersey.

"Vanished Smile" by R.A. Scotti-theft of the Mona Lisa painting in 1911.

"Wildflower" by Mark Seal. This is the true story of the life and untimely death of nature photographer and conservationist Joan Root, who was murdered in Kenya in 2006. The mystery was never solved as to who the perps were. It may have been a contract killing, as Root had made enemies in her fight to save the native wildlife and to end poaching locally. It may have been robbery. At any event, the suspects were freed after 2 years of jail. The book covers the fascinating life of Root and her photographer husband.

Thank you friedag, rosaearth and woodnymph2 for your continued additions. All of those sound interesting and I will have to look for them. rosaearth, I am more than busy! I am having a great time finding and reading as many as I can.

I am still looking for Delaware and North Dakota crime stories. I have also branched out from USA and Canada. I am looking for Australian cases and Irish cases, particularly 19th century ones. So if you run across any of those, please let me know! woodnymph2, I may have to look for more African ones too.

Thanks again to all!