A finite list of suspects. A killer among them. A remote location with no escape.
This is the closed circle mystery, and it’s been thrilling readers for nearly a century. The formula may sound simple—a small group of characters trapped somewhere (an island, a train, a snowbound hotel) being picked off one by one.
But what makes a closed circle mystery work isn’t the setting, but the paranoia that builds with each dead body that turns up. The location is merely a pressure cooker where trust evaporates and suspicion festers.
The closed circle mystery taps into something primal: the fear of being trapped with a malevolent force who wants to harm you, and the terror of not knowing who or why. Usually there is a slow realization that one of the party must be the killer, and the only way to escape alive is to find out the truth.
What past crime links the victims? What wrong is the killer trying to right? Every conversation becomes an interrogation. Every friendly gesture or shady behavior becomes a clue. And the best part is that the reader gets to play detective right alongside the survivors, armed with the same limited information and the same creeping dread.
Every mystery writer worth their salt writes a closed circle mystery at some point in their career. It’s a rite of passage, like your first corpse in a library or your first butler who did it.
One of the first, and most successful, was Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic And Then There Were None, where ten apparent strangers are taunted by a vengeful killer on a remote Devon island. The Dame used the trope again in her 1952 play The Mousetrap, featuring another group of strangers, this time trapped in a snowbound guesthouse with a serial killer.
But before those, The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning (1930) actually created the blueprint. Eight guests receive mysterious invitations to a dinner party at a Manhattan penthouse—but when they arrive, there’s no host. Instead, a disembodied voice accuses each of them of past crimes and announces they’ll pay with their lives.
The death traps are elaborate, the paranoia is thick, and escape is impossible. Bristow and Manning deserve credit for understanding that the real horror isn’t the method of murder, it’s being trapped with the knowledge that someone in the room is orchestrating it all.
The closed circle mystery has evolved considerably since their day, adapting to new settings and modern anxieties. Digital technology means it’s harder to get trapped anywhere—anywhere with a Wi-Fi signal has a thousand lifelines.
Writers have to think of new twists on the trope, new ways to trap their victims that embrace the modern world. For example, in my debut novel, Don’t Swipe Right, the closed circle of victims are the men that the protagonist, Gwen, has dated on her dating app, and they’re turning up dead in the exact order she dated them.
Here are five more contemporary takes.
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(High School Detention)
Karen M. McManus, One of Us Is Lying
Five students walk into detention. Only four walk out. McManus traps her suspects in the most relatable closed circle for YA readers—a high school where everyone’s got secrets they’d kill to protect.
The dead student ran a gossip app that knew everyone’s dirt, so the weapon here isn’t a knife or poison—it’s information, and the threat of exposure in an environment where social death feels as final as the real thing.
(New Year’s Eve at a Country Estate)
Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party
For a decade, a group of Oxford friends has gathered each New Year’s Eve to celebrate their continued success and general superiority. This year’s reunion at a remote Scottish Highlands estate takes a dark turn when a blizzard traps them—and someone ends up dead.
Foley understands something crucial: the people who’ve known you since university, who’ve witnessed your failures and embarrassments, who know exactly which buttons to push—those are the ones best equipped to destroy you. These aren’t strangers thrown together by circumstance, they’re old friends with old grudges, simmering resentments wrapped up in posh accents and expensive whisky.
(Snowed In at the Ski Chalet)
Ruth Ware, One by One
A corporate retreat at a luxury French Alps resort turns deadly when an avalanche cuts off all escape routes. Ware updates the isolated country mansion for the tech boom era—app developers instead of aristocrats, though the levels of entitlement and backstabbing remain the same. The staff can’t leave. The guests can’t leave. And someone is using the opportunity to settle old scores.
Ware layers in corporate intrigue and tech industry politics, proving that you don’t need old family grudges when you have stock options and hostile takeovers to fight over.
(Deep, Deep Underwater)
Will Dean, The Chamber
Will Dean takes the closed circle concept and literally submerges it in the North Sea. These divers can’t leave their hyperbaric chamber without dying from the bends—their bodies need time to adjust to normal pressure. But someone among them is a killer, which means staying put is equally deadly.
The real terror here is the ticking clock: every hour trapped together ratchets up both the physical pressure and the psychological paranoia. Being sealed at the bottom of the ocean with a murderer, no way to call for help, and the knowledge that opening the door means certain death—it’s mind games, exhaustion, suspicion all condensed into a metal tube.
(On Your Mobile Phone)
L.M. Chilton, Everyone in the Group Chat Dies
Imagine if a serial killer was in your group chat! In my latest novel, a killer infiltrates a the group chat of a bunch of room-mates, and starts picking them off, one by one. And if you try and “leaves” the conversation, you leave forever.
I wanted to create a contemporary spin on the closed circle mysteries I’ve always loved, where the claustrophobia comes from technology instead of geography. I realized that the group chat is the modern closed circle—everyone’s trapped in the thread together, notifications pinging with increasing dread. Turns out you don’t need a remote island when everyone’s already imprisoned by their phones.
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