Illegitimacy and the consequential stigmas of extramarital children have played a key role in the works of great authors, including Shakespeare, Voltaire, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Hardy, to name but a few.
Some noted mystery writers also have used out-of-wedlock birth as a plot centerpiece, including Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. But there’s no arguing that times have changed.
As of 2015, 40.3% of all births in the U.S. occurred outside of marriage (compared with 7% in 1940). And today’s illegitimacy rates are even higher for most European countries. The majority of births (over 50%) are outside of marriage in Iceland, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Portugal, and nearly half of births also are extramarital in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Belgium, Hungary, Spain, Austria and Finland.
As out-of-wedlock birth has become more commonplace, the social and legal status of illegitimate children, unwed mothers and cohabiting couples has improved. In the United States, for example, U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s found that most legal disabilities imposed on illegitimacy violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Yet extramarital children can still provide mystery writers with murder motives.
Even the old “Secret Shame” plot can be updated. For example, while illegitimacy alone may no longer be as socially unacceptable, illegitimacy resulting from other taboos–such as incest, rape or even adultery–can create a secret that someone will murder to conceal or avenge. Another plot device that still resonates is “The Unwanted Heir.”
When there is an inheritance to divide, even legitimate siblings can turn on each other, and a family outsider who stakes a claim can spark more than rude confrontations. “Cain and Abel” is one of the oldest plots around, so it’s easy to imagine bitter feelings between marital and extramarital siblings going to lethal lengths as they vie with each other for social status, financial gain or parental affection. Finally, there’s the traditional “Revenge” plot. Although many loving couples raise happy children outside of marriage today, there are less sanguine situations in which the violent feelings of a spurned lover, a betrayed spouse or an abandoned child can lead to murder.
For more famous fiction works with an illegitimacy theme, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimacy_in_fiction
One example is the Social Media Murders Series by Angela Clarke, starting with Follow Me. If you think social media feeds fame monsters, you’ll appreciate a plot in which recent graduate Freddie, who is trying to get her journalism career started via online contacts and posts, bumps into old friend Nasreen, now a police officer, and seeks a scoop by following her to a crime scene where a dead man lies slumped over his computer. Social media-savvy Freddie realizes the victim was a troll and finds the Twitter account of the “Hashtag Murderer,” who takes credit for the murder and posts cryptic clues to the next target, titillating press and public. Freddie and Nasreen are soon in the crosshairs as they race to catch the fame-crazed killer.
Or, maybe you fear that some folks in your social network of “friends” are playing unfriendly games.Then you won’t find any comfort in The Other Twin by L.V. Hay. In the British thriller, Poppy returns home after her sister India dies from a fall off a railway bridge and hacks into her sister’s laptop seeking the truth about her death. Poppy finds a social media world where resentments are played out online, identities are made and remade, and secrets outnumber truths.
Now if you’re a person who feels vulnerable to online-savvy miscreants, join tech-impaired, retired Detective Bill Hodges of Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy. In an unsolved case at the end of Hodges’ career, the “Mercedes Killer” used a stolen Mercedes to mow down a crowd of people waiting outside a job fair. Miserable in retirement, Hodges is jolted back to life by taunting messages from the killer and drawn into a cat-and-mouse game on an anonymous social media chat site, leading to a race to stop a psychopath.
Maybe you’re worried social posts are attracting undesirable followers who’ll try to move from virtual to actual contact. Then you’ll be terrified by The Secrets She Keeps from Michael Robotham. Unwed and pregnant Agatha, who works part-time stocking shelves at a grocery store, is fascinated by chic customer Meghan, who writes a droll parenting blog and boasts two perfect children and a happy marriage. When Agatha learns her blog idol is pregnant again, and that their due dates fall within the same month, she approaches the unsuspecting Meghan and sets something terrible in motion.
Or test your social nerves with Caroline Kepnes’ novel You. Beautiful Guinevere Beck shops in a New York bookstore where smitten employee Joe “Googles” the name on her credit card. Joe soon finds all he needs to know from her public Facebook account and constant Tweets. He begins to orchestrate meetings and events designed to push her into his arms, and removes any obstacles to his passion–even if it means murder.
Katherine Sharma’s family roots are in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. But after her early childhood in Texas, she has moved around the country and lived in seven other states, from Virginia to Hawaii. She currently resides in California with her husband and three children. She has also traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, and makes regular visits to family in India. After receiving her bachelor’s degree. in economics and her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan, Katherine worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor for more than 15 years. She then shifted into management and marketing roles for firms in industries ranging from outdoor recreation to insurance to direct marketing. Although Katherine still works as a marketing consultant, she is now focused on creative writing.
It seems appropriate to celebrate the romantic holiday with some romantic-mystery/mystery-romance genre mating. Maybe start by revisiting the popular “gothics” of my teen reading years: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart, Dragonwyck by Anya Seton and Wings of the Falcon by Barbara Michaels.
For more modern fare, try You Belong to Me by Karen Rose, in which a sexy widower cop and a troubled medical examiner find love while investigating a serial killer, or Heartbreaker by Julia Garwood as against-the-odds romance blossoms amid another serial murder case.
Or, embrace Stephanie Plum, the protagonist of Janet Evanovich’s popular series, for her debut with One for the Money, in which Stephanie takes a job hunting bail jumpers for a quick buck and is soon on the trail of a hot ex-beau with a price on his head while getting training from the studly “Ranger.”
All of these are sturdy romantic mystery entries, but, if you’re looking for more literary prose, read the Booker Prize-winning best-seller Possession by A.S. Byatt. Described as a “novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story,” the tale is built around a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets through their letters, journals, and poems, and tracking the dead poets’ movements from London to Yorkshire, with seances and fairy lore along the way.
I long to sleuth where the sky is red and home to two moons, where the aliens come from other worlds and not other countries, and where our unhappy Earth is a spaceship’s time-warp away. So here are some choices for those seeking justice in an alternative universe. Start with Red Planet Blues, by Robert J Sawyer, who is a Hugo and Nebula award winner. Set on Mars, the story takes place in the domed city of New Klondike (a future Elon Musk destination maybe). The town was built for miners seeking “fossils” that sell for big bucks on Earth, but the fossils ran out and the town has gone bust. Alex Lomax, a traditional PI character, is hired to find out who has killed the miners who first started the fossil rush, with the possibility of finding a cache of fossils worth millions.
Then there’s KOP by Warren Hammond. It’s about a policeman named Juno Mozambe whose family moved from Earth to the planet Lagarto, a promised utopia unfortunately dependent on a single export that has been replaced by cheap knock-offs. Amid the planet’s slums and poverty, cop Juno faces bribes from organized crime and a frame-up by a new partner.
Now if you want to land on a planet without unethical Earth pioneers, try acclaimed writer Lois McMaster Bujold’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning Mountains of Mourning, set in an imaginary galaxy. Interstellar investigator Miles Vorkosigan is sent to uncover the truth about a murder in a society that values physical perfection. A baby has been killed because of a physical defect, calling up an outlawed custom and prejudices against “mutants.” With the Village Speaker determined to hide the truth, Miles and his team, despite the advantages of special truth serum, must use all their skills to find the real killer.
Finally, there is the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which portrays a universe where humans and alien races try to coexist and respect each other’s differing laws. The penalties in this inter-species legal balancing act can be severe, and Miles Flint, a “retrieval artist,” is tasked with tracking down fugitives across worlds, torn between the demands of his police job and his sense of justice. Rusch is deft with cross-genre writing, as proven by her Endeavor and Hugo sci-fi awards as well as her Edgar mystery award nominations. For more options, check out 
So this very unusual political season has inspired me to take a closer look at political thrillers. An example is the just released novel about ISIS terrorism in France from bestselling political thriller author Daniel Silva. In The Black Widow, the spy hero is poised for promotion to chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service but takes on one final operation after ISIS detonates a massive bomb in Paris, and the desperate French government asks him to eliminate the man responsible before he can strike again.
The classic political thrillers emerged after World War II when the West faced a nuclear-armed world divided by Cold War ideologies and post-colonial chaos. Among the best-known works is Richard Condon’s 1959 The Manchurian Candidate about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into becoming an unwitting Communist assassin controlled by his domineering mother, who seeks to make her husband, a McCarthy-esque senator, into a puppet dictator.
In 1955, Graham Greene’s prescient The Quiet American depicts French and British colonialism in Vietnam being uprooted by American involvement during the 1950s, revealing a blind American “exceptionalism” that fails to see disaster looming.
Colonialism’s poisonous roots in the Muslim world are exposed in 1972′s Edgar Award-winning The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, about a mysterious professional assassin contracted to kill French President Charles de Gaulle by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organization upset by France’s Algeria policy.
More recently, America’s racial politics are the subject of A Certain Justice by John Lescroart, published in 2006: When an angry white mob in San Francisco murders an innocent black man, the only man who tried to stop the killing is framed and goes on the run amid riots, political posturing, and pressure on police to subvert justice.
Of course, money is at the root of political evil, and in 2001′s The Constant Gardner, by famed British spy novelist John le Carré, a British diplomat’s search for the truth about his activist wife’s murder in Africa uncovers an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucrats and pharmaceutical industry money. For Amazon’s latest political thrillers, see 
Among the well-known detectives in this group is bestselling author Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic New York City detective. NYC culprits also find a nemesis in George Chesbro’s dwarf criminology professor and private-eye Robert ‘Mongo’ Fredrickson. Proving lack of sight is not lack of insight is Jane A. Adams’ Naomi Blake, a blind ex-policewoman in the Midlands of England, while reading lips doesn’t hinder reading clues in Penny Warner’s Connor Westphal mysteries about a deaf newspaper journalist in California. For a list of more mysteries featuring physically challenged detectives, go to 
If you don’t mind a frisson of anxiety with your real or imagined cruise adventure, add some of these noted mystery authors’ tales of shipboard murder to your reading list. A well-known classic is Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, in which her Belgian sleuth Hercules Poirot plans a leisurely cruise down the Nile but ends up sifting through suspicious passengers and false leads to solve the murder of a wealthy young woman.
Bestselling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark also penned a thriller with a cruise setting. In Clark’s You Belong to Me, a killer stalks lonely women on board cruise ships as a radio-show psychologist rushes to catch the murderer before he can literally stop her dead.
Famed New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh even introduced her mystery series’ police detective Roderick Alleyn to the high seas in Singing in the Shrouds, sending Alleyn on a ship voyage in pursuit of a serial killer. But the King of Ocean-Liner Fiction is Conrad Allen. Allen’s eight mysteries in the “Murder on the…” series are all set aboard pre-World War I cruise ships, starting with Murder on the Lusitania, and feature a husband and wife sleuthing team.
For an updated ocean liner tale, fans of the “Murder, She Wrote” mystery series will appreciate Murder on the QE2, by Donald Bain and “Jessica Fletcher,” as Jessica, invited aboard as one of seven guest lecturers, tries to solve the murder of a fellow speaker. For more mysteries with cruise ship settings, see 
The glitz of Sin City long ago ceased to enthrall me, but I admit that the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” world is a perfect setting for mystery novels that I do enjoy. For example, 2015 Edgar Award-winner Chris Albani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas: A Novel offers an original plot in which a near-retirement Las Vegas detective and a South African doctor studying psychopaths join forces to solve a spate of murders implicating a pair of conjoined twins.
Dark Eye by William Bernhardt features psychologist Susan Pulaski, a Las Vegas police consultant whose life has spun out of control after the death of her cop husband, ending with an LVPD pink slip and a trip to detox. As a serial killer begins decorating Sin City with the horribly disfigured bodies of once beautiful young women, Pulaski is trying to regain her job and reputation, and stop a madman. She gets surprise help from a 25-year-old autistic savant whose unusual perspective forces her to see the crimes from a bizarre–but ultimately insightful–viewpoint.