If you are struggling with a birthday party idea for your teen, a murder mystery will be the perfect theme. Here's how a party of yours might go: INVITAIONS: you can always make your own invitations from printer paper-you can cut out letters from magazines and newspapers to write down who the party is for, where the party is held, what time to be there, etc...this will give the feeling of a mystery in place and it would really match the theme! Or, you can just write down all of the information about the party but decorate it in markers and paint in question marks or put fingerprints all over the invitation which would also give a feeling of murder mystery. DECORATIONS: You can purchase black and red balloons along with black and red streamers and decorate all over your party place. You can also add some cut outs of a city, people, etc... I would also have your birthday person lay down on the floor and use masking tape to outline your child's body-it would look like a CSI case and the invites would have to examine it(optional) but it's just decoration. You may also scatter items around the outline of the body like a fake cigarette but, pieces of hair, etc... ACTIVITIES:*Murder Mystery-you can buy different murder mystery cases from hostparty.com or you can write one yourself like me-have your invites to r.s.v.p. about a week or 2 so that you have time to plan your murder mystery. Write down all the names of the invites and in a hat or container, pick one name. This will be the murder victim. Do the same thing for the murderer, murder weapon, and the witness(optional). Give your invites a character on a card that includes age, job, where they were at the time of murder, and what they have against the victim. From this, have different evidence pieces which the invites will have to figure out the murderer. You can also buy a fingerprinting kit so that the kids can have fun figuring out the case. You can do this a couple of times-at most 3- so that there will be variety. Another game is STOLEN GIFTS-when the kids are eating,or whatever, you, or someone that isn't busy, take all of the gifts and hide them in different places around the house. There will be different clues which will be already made and the kids have to figure out who stole it-relate this to real life,or try to, if not, you can also use the same characters you used for the murder mysteries. After this, the birthday child can open the gifts. If this is too much work for you, you can always have a CSI murder party. If you watch CSI, you can choose your favorite episode/case and use that-but change it up a bit because the kids might have watched that episode-the invites can also be in the story of the case. If this doesn't help with all of the work, you can go to mangafox.com and read about Detective Conan. Those cases are very entertaining and a lot of suspense is also in there so kids won't get bored. If your murder mystery doesn't go that long, you can always add classic games or make up your own games-but try to keep it to mystery-or kinda close! =] Also, you can write different clues-but pretending it's the murderer/suspect, around the house leading to different clues and solving a mystery-it doesn't necessarily have to be murder. SNACKS:try to get small snack foods like Cheese-its, Chex-Mix, M&M's, Skittles, cupcakes decorated with question marks, detective hat,etc...you can always try to make up your own games with these snacks-but don't have the kids eat too much-we don't want them unhealthy! Cake: you can buy a plain cake from the store and decorate it yourself with question marks all over the cake, crime scene tape, detective hat, magnifying glass, etc... or bake your own cake. FAVORS: different favors for your party are: mini magnifying glasses, crime scene tape, mechanical pencils, mini notepad, candy, magnets, or even Japanese erasers-just for fun! You can always change these ideas up a bit and Have FUN! :)