Toad with Books

Someone is lying, something is missing, and the person asking questions probably has other things they should be doing. That’s their problem. Yours is figuring out where the story begins. These fifteen first-sentence prompts give you a suspicious detail, an unexpected discovery, or a question that refuses to go away. Pick one that makes you curious and follow it—you can work out who’s guilty later.

Fifteen Ways to Start a Mystery

1. My sister’s missing-person poster used a photograph I had taken three days after she disappeared.
2. Someone had been returning the library’s missing books one at a time, each with an apology addressed to a different dead person.
3. When the police asked what was missing, Dad looked at the empty wall and said, “Nothing,” although the painting had hung there for forty years.
4. The woman who won our village baking competition had used my grandmother’s recipe, including the ingredient she had deliberately left out of every written copy.
5. According to the receipt in his pocket, my husband had bought two coffees while I was identifying his body.
6. I’d spent six weeks photographing a man who, according to the woman paying me, wasn’t her husband after all.
7. The burglar had ignored the cash beside my laptop and taken the framed photograph of my third-grade class.
8. Halfway through the interview, the witness asked me to stop tapping my pen, although we had told no one how the victim used to signal for help.
9. The bride’s mother paid me to find the groom, then offered me twice as much to stop looking.
10. Every account of the accident mentioned the rain, but I’d spent that entire afternoon waiting for enough wind to fly a kite under a cloudless sky.
11. Mrs. Bell reported her garden gnome stolen every Thursday until the morning I finally asked her to describe the man who brought it back.
12. Sorting through my father’s tax records, I discovered he had been paying rent on the house next door for eleven years.
13. The restaurant’s security camera showed everyone leaving through the front door, including the chef we later found in the walk-in freezer.
14. “Before you open the coffin,” my aunt whispered, “I need you to tell me whether you’re wearing the necklace.”
15. I recognized the handwriting on the anonymous complaint because I had spent most of my childhood forging it.

Follow the Clue

Choose one opening and write the scene that comes next. Give your main character something concrete to investigate: a receipt, a photograph, a missing object, or a detail in someone’s story that doesn’t quite fit.

Then come up with two explanations for that clue—one innocent and one incriminating. Write so that either could still be true. You don’t have to solve the whole mystery today; making someone suspicious before lunch is a perfectly respectable start.