Death on a train, ritual-like murders, a highly contagious virus that seemingly came out of nowhere — sorry, too soon? These are the premises of some of our most suspenseful and eyebrow-raising mystery stories on Topic. Not your average whodunits, these murder-mysteries tap into parts of the human psychology that would have made Agatha Christie clutch her pearls. But, personally, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with delighting in the sick and twisted. In fact, as long as the story is good, we say the sicker, the better. How sick are we talking? How about a girl who wakes up to find her own dead body, and then has to solve her own murder? Yup, we’ve got that covered. Read on for six of our most creepy mysteries to feed your morbid curiosity.
Beautiful wintry coastlines, a booming economy, the freshest seafood in the northern hemisphere. Most might think of Oslo as practically a utopia, but in this gritty series, the city is on the verge of experiencing arguably the greatest threat to humanity. Deep beneath the city’s Valkyrien subway station, doomsday prepper Leif runs an elaborate underground lab fully equipped with state-of-the-art technology and medical machinery, where a doctor named Ravn works in secret to try and save his wife. The series reveals a much darker side to Oslo, both through Leif’s paranoid point-of-view and through the everyday folks who have been failed by the system. Will Leif and Ravn be the city’s best hope? Or is Oslo doomed along with the rest of the planet?
There are murder mysteries and then there’s “Beau Séjour,” an entirely different kind of whodunit. That’s because the person at the center of the investigation is the victim herself. The series opens with Kato waking up in a hotel room to find her own dead body in a bathtub splattered with blood, with no recollection of what happened. Stuck in a limbo between life and death and invisible to everyone except for a handful of people in town, Kato must figure out who killed her in a small community tangled up in secrets. Everyone, from her best friend to her own sister, seems to be hiding something connected to her death. Sometimes the path to the truth is concealed by the people closest to you.
This series opens with two officers discovering a dying sex worker in the basement of a secluded cabin. And it only gets weirder from there! A highly contagious, deadly virus is discovered in the victim’s body. The series follows officer Nina Kautsalo and virologist Thomas Lorenz as they try to contain and identify the virus while tracking an active serial killer — which included more than one daring snowmobile chase! If the murder and epidemic themes don’t chill you, then the starkly white landscape of Finland’s icy Lapland certainly will.
Ah, nothing like a good old-fashioned train mystery — not so fast. Set on the famous railway between China and Moscow, “Transsiberian” definitely colors outside of its genre lines. The film stars Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer as a traveling couple who meet a Russian narcotics officer (played by Ben Kingsley) and get themselves mixed up in murder, a drug deal gone wrong, and a train crash. It may sound like the vacation from hell, but it also makes for one deliciously twisty mystery movie.
When a series starts out with the discovery of a body forced into a strange pose, you know that things are going to get interesting. Set along the Austrian-German border, “Pagan Peak” follows two detectives, one from each side, who investigate a series of ritual-like murders that lead them into the dark depths of the Alpine wilderness, which can definitely be a scary place, but not nearly as terrifying as inside the killer’s mind. Fans of “The Bridge”/”Broen” will love this new twist on an old fave.
Imagine getting a postcard in the mail that said, “We want what you have,” with no other context or explanation. I don’t know about you, but I’d freak out. That’s what happens to a diverse group of London residents with nothing in common except for their connection to Pepys Road, a fictional street where the property value has skyrocketed over the years. When they all receive the same postcard, these very separate lives are forced to intertwine. At its core, “Capital” explores a truly terrifying modern theme that we can all relate to: the increasing economic divide caused by rapidly growing cities.