50 Mystery Story Ideas: Plots and Writing Prompts!

Question 1

1. A woman asks a writer to write the story of her life. Then she goes missing.
2. Murder victims are found buried with some of their wordly goods, Viking style.
3. Three people close to the murder victim have confessed. Each of them swears they acted alone.
4. Notes and gifts from her “Secret Santa” at work take a strange turn.

Answer 1

5. It’s going to be a beautiful wedding at a beautiful destination, but two people in the wedding party have been murdered.
6. The creator of a high-tech prototype that will change an industry has gone missing.
7. Her parents believe her to be their biological child, but they all learn otherwise.
8. The dead woman’s wedding ring is found in a ditch forty miles away.
9. A museum conservator is restoring an old painting, and an X-ray reveals something shocking or mysterious painted or written in the layer beneath.
10. A sorority sister who bullied prospective pledges is found dead.

Question 2

11. As a man researches his genealogy, he finds that ancestors from a few different generations and a few different countries made visits to the same remote place.
12. Someone replaced the woman’s contact lens solution with a damaging liquid.
13. He’s always been a faithful husband, but someone has planted false evidence of his having an affair.
14. A detective is hired for a high price to find a thief who stole something that doesn’t appear to have any real value.
15. Every unmarried lady at the ball wanted to dance with the duke, so it’s too bad he was found stabbed in the garden.

Answer 2

16. In the middle of a wilderness, someone finds an abandoned bunker with security cameras, powered by a generator.
17. The graves of historic figures are being robbed.
18. Clues to the mystery come to him in dreams, but nobody believes him.
19. Serial murders in cities in two different countries are very similar.
20. A man she didn’t know left her a valuable and unusual item in his will.
21. A writer researching his biography of a Golden Age movie star comes across something that makes him suspect that contrary to the official story, she was a murder victim.