While updating my already unrealistically long to read list today, I decided to look at Geocaching themed mysteries. There are a lot more than I realized! Some are written by established authors, some by geocachers. I have no idea how good any of them are until I read them.. let me know if you have read them, what you think! And let me know if there are any I have missed!
First To Find by Morgan Talbot
Book 1 - Death is the hardest puzzle to solve.
Margarita Williams escaped death at a young age, but its shadow has followed her all her life. Now, amidst the chaos of a new Australian roommate and mysterious, menacing neighbors, Death has set the puzzlemaker a puzzle of her own. Someone is killing her fellow geocachers, one by one.
Supersmeller Bindi Ryan left Australia to marry a man who abandoned her the minute her plane landed in Oregon. When thieves steal a local sculpture and a teenage friend is blamed, Bindi and her nose must prove him innocent and find the real culprits. But are she and Margarita working on two mysteries, or one?
I got this one for FREE by signing up on his website -
Cache 72 – A Jaxon Jennings Thriller
72 hours. That's what the note said. 72 hours and the girl would be dead. Jaxon held the paper in one hand and the severed finger in the other. It was not a hoax. A day with his new hobby had turned into something he hadn’t seen coming.
GeoCaching—a modern scavenger hunt—was now a race against time. A woman he had never met was praying he wouldn't fail.
72 hours. Three days. A life hanging in the balance and the clock ticking. The killer's game deadly. Jaxon Jennings, retired cop and private eye, knew the girl had only one chance…
And he was it.
(I could not find a digital version of this book, it appears to only be available as a paperback)
Despite the poorly written description on Amazon, this book reviews well -
"Players of a treasure hunting game called geocaching uncover the grisly and obscure clues left by a spree murderer. Players find these clues scattered around the country and write about them online. A couple in Austin, Texas begin to pull the clues together and a horrific picture begins to emerge. Will they identify and apprehend the killer before he kills again? Not before the killer joins their game. . ."
Geocaching isn't supposed to be about finding dead bodies. But when retiree, Frannie Shoemaker go camping, standard definitions don't apply. A weekend in a beautiful state park in Iowa buzzes with fund-raising events, a search for Ninja turtles, a bevy of suspects, and lots of great food. But are the campers in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often?
A woman’s corpse is discovered in a peaceful Austrian meadow. More disturbing, a strange combination of letters and numbers has been tattooed on the soles of her feet. Detective Inspector Beatrice Kaspary from the local murder squad quickly identifies the digits as map coordinates. These lead to a series of gruesome discoveries as she and her colleague Florin Wenninger embark on a bloody trail―a modern-day scavenger hunt using GPS navigation devices to locate hidden caches. The “owner” of these unofficial, unpublished geocaches is a highly calculating and elusive fiend who leaves his victims’ body parts sealed in plastic bags, complete with riddles that culminate in a five-stage plot. Kaspary herself becomes an unwilling pawn in the perpetrator’s game of cat and mouse as she risks all to uncover the motives behind the murderer’s actions.
Ursula Archer’s Five is a disturbing roller-coaster ride through the madness and mayhem of a serial killer’s psyche, and a detective’s desperate attempts to thwart it. Filled with twists and mind-bending turns, this masterful debut is not to be missed.
I've read this one. It's very puzzle cache based, and the ending is a VERY nice touch for puzzle cachers. Quick read.
A Novella
After a vicious robbery at a theme park, callous gang leader, Greg Armstrong blows up a roller coaster to aid their escape, resulting in eighty-seven deaths. Months later, Kurt Vaughn and his family are enjoying a day out geocaching, but Kurt is about to discover that there’s more to the treasure hunt than he realizes as the caches supposedly lead to the stolen money, and the crooks are on the trail. Now Kurt and his family find themselves pawns in a far more deadly game.
Of the books on this list that I have read, this is definitely one of the better ones!
Attorney Sabre Brown is having a great time geocaching, the Internet’s version of a treasure hunt. The fun ceases when she “caches” a container with an official death certificate citing “Murder by Poison” as the cause of death. Even more disturbing is that the date of death is ten days in the future.
Sabre is forced to search cache after cache, each revealing more clues, until they take an unexpected twist and shockingly point to one of her court cases. Is the murderer a rejected child, a well-known plastic surgeon, a scorned ex, a crooked lab technician, or a politician in line for the highest office in the land? Or is someone playing Sabre in an ugly geocache of life and death?
Porcupine City is a peaceful little town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The residents enjoy a quiet life far removed from the comings and goings of larger cities. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone else and good-natured gossip is a prime source of entertainment. It's certainly the last place anyone would think of using as the backdrop for a high-tech, high-thrill treasure hunt.
Until the first gruesome clue is found: a headless corpse wrapped in plastic.
Deputy Steve Martinez--Lakota Indian by birth, Porcupine City native by association--has investigated many crimes, but none more surprising than the case before him now. When clues at the first crime scene lead to the discovery of a second headless corpse, it becomes clear to Steve that it's someone's twisted idea of a game. And these events couldn't come at worse time: the election for county sheriff is fast approaching and the sudden rash of corpses is just the sort of ammunition Steve's opponent is all too eager to use against him. Luckily Steve's longtime love, beautiful redhead Ginny Fitzgerald, is still by his side, but even that relationship becomes strained as Steve searches for a way to connect with her foster son, Tommy.
This is Steve's toughest investigation yet--one that spreads from secretive internet chatrooms into Chicago's seedy underbelly and even takes to the air above Porcupine City. It will take all of Deputy Martinez's patience and cunning to catch a sociopath who's after the next forbidden rush. It might also force him to face some unpleasant truths about the locals he has sworn to protect.
"Geogirl is a novel separate from the Cassidy Callahan Adventures. In this book Gwendolyn Brody is a college student at Franklinburg University and summer vacation is coming up. When a friend invites her to go with him to participate in a geocaching contest Gwendolyn jumps at the chance to do something besides going home, and working the summer at a fast food joint. It doesn't take her long to find more adventures that she thought possible while looking for hidden geocaches. Follow Gwen and Tony on a rollicking fun adventure across the U.S."
The Cliff Knowles series has seven books so far. They are all available on amazon for about $2.99 each. Written By Russell Atkinson, with the geoname The Rat, a former FBI agent who has been geocaching since 2002.
From his bio page "The Cliff Knowles Mysteries can be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good mystery novel, but geocachers especially enjoy the way geocaching is woven into some of the books. The author is an experienced geocacher, having begun caching in 2002. He geocaches under the name THE RAT. He has found over 2000 caches and has placed over 90 caches. He has completed the original Well-Rounded Cacher (The Fizzy Challenge) (GC11E8N) and over 400 favorite points have been awarded to his caches."
Hello Traveler, a short story by Steve Armstrong
Six friends find a box hidden in the woods. Inside is a flashlight, and this peculiar message:
Hello Traveller, and congratulations! You have found the first box. There’s nothing valuable inside, just a random, everyday object. Somewhere out there are four more boxes with four more random everyday items. Together these five objects tell the story of my life up until now. Each item symbolizes something essential about who I am, where I have been, and what I have done. Can you put these pieces together, to solve the puzzle of my life?
As the friends locate the boxes and attempt to figure out what each hidden object means, the mystery takes on an unexpected dimension for one of them.
A beautiful woman stands by the side of the road, barefoot and bleeding, a child in her arms. Someone just tried to kill her, but she wouldn't recognize him if she saw his face. She doesn't even remember her own name. A suburban cop surveys a kitchen in disarray--a woman and child missing, a chilling note. This crime scene is unlike any he has ever seen. The man who calls himself Gideon waits and plans. He sees himself as a destroyer of evil, one who rids the world of abominations. He has already killed five. He will kill again. And somewhere in the wilderness, in a secret geocache near where the wild swans gather, lies the unspeakable clue that links them all together. Michigan's rugged and beautiful Upper Peninsula is the setting for this absorbing tale of love and loss, beauty and terror, grievous sins and second chances. A deftly woven thriller from the popular author of the Rock Harbor novels.
Mallory has just made a series of disastrous decisions that may destroy her career. In the aftermath, she just wants a long hike, maybe to find a geocache, and to be left alone to sort out her troubles. Instead, she finds herself on a madcap chase through the Utah desert with an aging hippie and a dusty old treasure map as her only guides. Chased by unknown strangers, lost in a maze of bewildering rock formations, and running out of time, can Mallory find her way out, find the mythic treasure of the Lost Frenchman, and maybe find a solution to her problems before it all catches up with her?
I read this while at the ASPGB 2017. I would not recommend this if you are looking for a geocaching mystery. It's actually about a town where almost everyone is a registered sex offender, or a victim of an offender. One of the victims is cutting of the, uhm, "male parts" of registered sex offenders, and hiding those parts in geocaches. It's much more about sex offenders than about geocaching, the geocaching is just kind of awkwardly thrown in there and doesn't make much sense.
Geocaching mystery. (Note: This novel is hidden in cache sites around the US and Canada.) Officer Brett Reed will do anything to gain custody of his five-year-old daughter, Quinn. But when a judge grants Brett’s drug-addicted ex-wife custody and slaps him with a protective order for losing his temper, he fears for Quinn’s safety. Who will protect her now?
When Quinn is found abandoned on the streets, the child is placed in a temporary foster home until Child Protective Services can complete an assessment. It should only take a few days. But a lot can happen in a few days.Especially when there’s a deranged psychopath on the loose, someone who’s attacking pedophiles, someone who wants to protect children like Quinn, and someone who’s planting body parts in geocaching sites. M. Weidenbenner plants the emotion of one vigilante's mission into the cache boxes of a gripping tale that will leave readers locking their doors and pedophiles sleeping with their eyes open.
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More Mentions:
Neal Stephensons REAMDE has a paragraph on geocaching. One of the best lines being:
“But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware Containers and ammo boxes of random knick-knacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people keep visiting these sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries.”
Possibly about geocaching -
Book 8 in the Passport To Peril Series
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15844412-bonnie-of-evidence
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