Great Resource. Breaks Concepts Down for Easy Understanding.
Customer Rating: 
I bought this book because I recently had an idea for a historical romance with a strong mystery/suspense plot. I've never tried to write a full-on mystery before and I felt intimidated. The idea of having multiple suspects and subplots and dropping (and hiding clues) felt overwhelming to me.
When I looked through the books offered on Amazon for mystery writing, I saw many reviews that said the books were less about mystery writing and more about writing in general, which was not what I wanted. I already own books on writing and I've studied writing, so I just wanted a book to explain the particulars of the mystery genre. This book was perfect.
The book is divided into four main sections: Planning, Writing, Revising, and Selling Your Mystery Novel. Each section includes several chapters. The first section covers the basics: The premise, the sleuth, the villain, the crime, the suspects, etc. The Writing Section explains dialogue, point-of-view (POV), how to insert clues and make them seem unimportant next to red herring clues. There is also a chapter on how to write the action/suspense scenes.
As other reviewers have stated, this book contains a lot of exercises. Some of the exercises relate to using examples from your own work-in-progress and some exercises are based on excerpts from other books that Ephron presents and you have to continue the dialogue or write another version of the scene.
I enjoyed this book because it broke things down in a way that was easy for me to understand. I found Chapter 17, Writing Investigation: Clues, Red Herrings, and Misdirection, to be very helpful. Page 157-158 in my edition explain how to distract the reader from realizing the significance of a clue. The chapter on the villain is basic, but useful. One important question it asks is: is the crime appropriate for the villain? Is the villain strong enough, smart enough, dumb enough for this crime? What kind of villain would commit this type of crime? Why would he or she choose this method?
There is also some useful stuff on POV: examining the way different characters talk and using tone and sentence structure to highlight the difference between characters.
One of the things that came through clearly in this book is that no one ever writes a brilliant first draft. There is always going to be something that has to be layered in or re-worked later. It was a relief to me to really understand this. I mean, I have done it (completely reworked a plot or a scene after writing a first draft), but somehow, I forgot that during this process of planning out my historical mystery.
Ephron is very thorough and includes information on picking out agents, publishers, critique partners, and even book doctors. She even includes a checklist to see if a small press publisher is reputable, which is useful for the novice writer. Writers who have been around a while or who are active in writers groups may already know some of this information, but it's useful if you're new to writing or new to mystery writing.
There is also an example of a query letter and cover page and what formatting is required. This is a selling point in my opinion because when I first started writing, I found that many books gave you advice on how to write but not on proper submission formatting. Where should your contact information be on the title page? What font or spacing should you use? The only thing that would have made it better would have been an example of a synopsis.
This is an excellent book because it gives a lot of advice for 248 pages and if you only have money to buy one book on mystery writing, I think this is a great one to start with.
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