8th Day of the Penguin Challenge

Day 8 is It's A Mystery.  I assume it means what kind of mystery books do I read.
I haven't really read a lot of mysteries. I think I read thriller type books. I like detective books and I guess those are mystery. In the popular series of books I like the Alex Cross mysteries by James Patterson though I don't read anything else by him. I like Michael Connolly and Robert Crais. Those are series I have followed for years. I just finished Alex Cross Book 22. Though I must say they are a bit more graphic than they were in the beginning and I am beginning to tire of them.

I tend to save mysteries more for television or movies. I do like Agatha Christie and I prefer Hercule Poirot over Miss Marple.  She gets on my nerves sometime.  I used to read all of The Cat Who ...... mysteries by Lillian Jackson Braun. They were stories of a retired journalist who lived in the northern midwest, perhaps Michigan as she had a house there.  His name was Jim Quilleran and he lived in a small town with his two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum. There was always a murder and he would be on the trail but the cats gave him the final clue he needed. They were fun.

She wrote a long series of these before she died.  I believe she was in her 90's. I really liked her. I call these mysteries "gentle ones" because the characters did not get raped, pillaged or dismembered.  It seems people were once satisfied with gentle mysteries. The detective has a body, not much blood and then spends the rest of the book finding who did it.

Now though the mysteries are quite gory and one must be careful to be sure they know what they are buying if they don't like them.  I think it desensitises me to crime in general along with all that goes on in the world.  So for today, I will stick with Agatha.  What mysteries do you read?