I love a good mystery as much as the next person, and I especially love mystery novels where we get a sense for the detective or sleuth’s character — they’re more than just a figurehead asking the questions, but a fully formed person whose thoughts, opinions, and experiences have a direct impact on the mystery. LGBTQ+ people almost always go through the world experiencing life through a slightly different lens than those who are cis and straight, so queer characters solving crimes seems like an obviously intriguing setup to me! However, finding those queer characters in the mystery genre hasn’t always been simple, and I feel like it’s a mark of progress when we can find really great genre fiction starring queer protagonists whose queerness is tangential to the plot: their identities aren’t the point of the story, but their identities do have an impact on how they inveterate a crime. I’ve been collecting a list of mystery and crime novels starring LGBTQ+ women for a couple of years now, and I am especially pleased to see that my own list is long enough to warrant a post — this was definitely not the case when I first started to seek out LGBTQ+ mysteries around 2016!The following books are all written for adult audiences, and they even span genre lines, with a few sci-fi and historical fiction mash-ups! But all of them are, at their core, a mystery novel with a queer lady solving the crime. From Oklahoma to Australia, these books cover a lot of ground and a wide range of crimes. Some have a romantic subplot or focus, and for some, the character’s queer identity is kept out of focus. All are really excellent, and there’s a nice variety in terms of the mystery, for whatever floats your boat!