Book Fair of Death: Murder Mystery

One of the final High School programs that we did over the summer was a Murder Mystery Night. It was called Book Fair of Death, and it gave participants a chance to take on a role, and solve a mystery.

Emily Thornton was supposed to appear at a book fair and author signing at the Hayden Library, but just hours before the event, she was found dead! But, don't worry. Detective Bibliophile is on the scene, and he is going to get to the bottom of it...with a little help from the program participants.

Ultimately I got the idea and the majority of how to run this program from the Collaborative Summer Library Program 2012 Teen Summer Reading manual. They had already written the scenario, given some short character sketches, and a list of the props necessary.

The manual mentioned two different ways of running the program: getting volunteers and staff to appear as the characters in the murder mystery, and then the teens that came would just be asking questions and trying to piece together what happened. Or, the teens that came could be the characters, and try to figure out which one of them had murdered the victim. We kind of blended the two ideas with a couple staff members and volunteers mixed in with our teen participants who also played some characters.

Between examining evidence, getting statements from the characters, asking questions, and accusing someone, the program took about an hour and a half and was way too much fun! The teens really got into asking other characters questions and trying to figure out which one of them had done it.

If you would like to run a similar program, you can purchase scripts and character lists from MyMysteryParty.com, or you could get a hold of me and I could most likely share more information about the script and characters that we used =D