A wisecracking comic mystery set on Long Island, in which a schoolteacher named Rosie becomes a murder suspect when her estranged husband is found dead on her kitchen floor.

He was the author of nearly 30 books including the comic mystery The Widening Stain.

The British author (of the Charles Paris comic mysteries, as well as this new series) usually draws amusingly waspish character studies of possible and probable murderers.

The Falcon's Malteser is a comic mystery for by Anthony Horowitz.

Heller, the author of such comic mysteries as the forthcoming "Sis Boom Bah," says that she used to hate Clemens, especially when he drilled her favorite Yankees.

In the 1990s Banks wrote a series of comic mysteries set in the equestrian world of dressage, a competitive sport that Banks herself practiced.

I asked Heller, who writes comic mysteries, to make a joke, to tell me Sims was wrong.

There were a series of wise-cracking, tightly structured comic mysteries that had a large audience roaring for the first time since the 1930's.

Several are delicately touching; others range beyond satire into comic mystery.

But Mr. Westlake's one-shot comic mysteries, like Wodehouse's non-series farces, are also very much worth reading, and "Smoke" is no exception.