Isolation Can Deepen a Mystery's Impact

If you're like me, you're finding the isolation of social distancing increasingly tiresome, but it certainly improves understanding of why social, mental and physical isolation is such a powerful element in mystery writing. In a strange way it's also comforting; current isolation is lonely and boring, but at least danger is kept at bay, outside of a secure personal space. Not so, with mysteries and thrillers! For example, the great Agatha Christie traps 10 characters on a mysterious island as they are killed off one by one in And Then There Were None. In the lesser known The Sittaford Mystery, Christie puts six people in an isolated snowbound house on the moors. They amuse themselves with a seance until "spirits" announce the murder of a neighbor, and one of the group walks six miles through snow to check on the potential victim, who is indeed dead. There are motives aplenty; it's the means that seem impossible. Or try Ruth Ware's claustrophobic The Woman in Cabin 10 about a woman travel-magazine writer on an exclusive luxury cruise assignment. She believes she has witnessed a woman being thrown overboard, but when all passengers are accounted for, the ship sails on, trapping her at sea where something (or someone) has gone terribly wrong. Smilla's Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg, combines the icy loneliness of Greenland with a young sleuth, Smilla Jasperson, who is herself socially and emotionally distant and living far from her roots in Copenhagen. When she becomes convinced that a six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like herself, did not accidentally fall to his death from a building, Smilla follows clues back to Greenland, where an explosive secret waits under the ice. In the aptly named Isolation, an entry in Mary Anna Evans' Faye Longchamp series, archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth is on her Florida island home struggling to recover from a personal loss when a close friend at the local marina is brutally murdered. Faye must reach back over a century into her family's history to fight an insidious danger. A disturbing gothic homage to isolation comes in Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island. During the summer of 1954, two U.S. Marshals arrive on the island, now a hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a murderess patient as a hurricane bears down. Unreliable narrators lead the reader into a nightmare maze of madness and Cold War paranoia. And just this year, Australian Jaye Ford debuts Beyond Fear about Jodie Cramer, a teen survivor of a terrifying assault by three strangers, who 17 years later joins three girlfriends for a fun weekend in a secluded cabin. When the isolation reawakens her fears, she tries to convince her friends they are in danger, but they dismiss her foreboding as flashbacks—until two men knock at the door. For more fiction with themes of isolation, loneliness and alienation, see http://www.novelrecommendations.com/novels-loneliness-isolation-alienation/

Mother's Day Lauds Bond With Deadly Breaks

In May, Mother's Day celebrates what most of us see as a sacred bond, natural and social, between mothers and children. But that bond is more tenuous than we like to think. A study in Forensic Science International looked at filicide cases (killing of a child by a parent) between 1976 and 2007 and found they occur about 500 times a year in the United States, with more than 40% of the murders committed by mothers. Cheryl Meyer, co-author of several books on the subject, said it's probable that a mother kills a child once every three days in the U.S. Filicide expert and forensic psychiatrist Phillip J. Resnick identifies five major reasons a mother might kill her child. One motive is misguided altruism--believing death is in the child's best interest, either based on the reality of a child's terminal illness or a conviction the child needs to be saved from a cruel world, especially if the parent intends to commit suicide. Of course, acute psychosis is another explanation, such as when a mother thinks her child is demon-possessed or obeys "voices." Sometimes the killer mom just wants to be rid of an unwanted child seen as a hindrance. Or perhaps the killing is the accidental result of cruel physical abuse or neglect. The least common motive is spousal revenge a la Medea: a mother killing her child to exact revenge on her spouse. Maternal filicide is a common theme in the true crime genre, and it has played a key role in well-known fiction works such as Toni Morrison's Beloved or Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island. In recent fiction, there's Veronique Olmi's haunting Beside the Sea, which captures the twisted altruism of a single mother who takes her beloved two sons on a last fun-filled trip to the seaside before freeing them from what she sees as an uncaring and dangerous world. Best-selling author Tami Hoag offers The Boy, in which detectives must solve the question of whether a mother, who ran panicked into the night after an alleged intruder killed her 7-year-old son, is suffering an unfathomable loss or is guilty of an unthinkable crime. Little Deaths by Emma Flint focuses on Ruth Malone, a single mother in 1965 Queens, NY, who works long hours as a cocktail waitress and insists she woke up to find her two small children missing. When their bodies are discovered, the lead detective concludes Malone is the killer, but a dogged tabloid reporter questions whether the unhappy mother is a killer, victim of circumstance or pawn of something more sinister. The Big Girls by Susanna Moore addresses both the destructive power of maternal instinct and our cult of celebrity by bringing together four characters at a women's prison: a woman serving a life sentence for murder of her children; the female chief of psychiatry; a male corrections desiring the psychiatrist, and an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by the convicted killer. For more on filicide in America, see https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/07/health/filicide-parents-killing-kids-stats-trnd/index.html

Mysteries with a Mystical Bent

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Sedona, Arizona, with girlfriends, including visits to shops stocked with religious icons, New Age literature and rocks claiming various mystical properties. We also hiked to a famous "vortex" to imbibe its earth energy. Now I must admit that a number of curious things occurred near the vortex; for example, a strange man suddenly appeared on the trail and handed out free heart-shaped pieces of red sandstone to our group of gals before moseying on. Divine Messenger or Loco Local? Choose the most satisfying answer. Now as a rule, I tend to avoid detective fiction that relies on the workings of angels, fairies, witches, vampires, ghosts, psychics or otherwordly powers, animal or mineral, as plot devices in solving mysteries. But I also make exceptions. Here are some popular mysteries with a paranormal bent, starting with favorite author Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, about U.S. Marshals who go to an island asylum to investigate the disappearance of a criminally insane patient. Some detecting powers I'd rather not have. In Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds, Miriam Black can tell with a touch when you're going to die, and the hero of The Cypress House by best-selling author Michael Koryta can sense imminent death. If you like folks who can use magical powers to catch criminals, try prolific author Heather Blake's It Takes a Witch, whose heroine casts spells to grant wishes, with some murderous consequences. If you believe in psychic sleuthing, read any entry in Kay Hooper's series about the FBI Special Crimes Unit's psychic detecting. For ghost lovers, there's Night of the Living Deed by E.J. Copperman, about a haunted guesthouse where the ghosts expect the new owner to solve their murders. And that brings us back to Sedona, and Mathew Marine's Devil's Moon about a troubled FBI agent who gets involved in investigating a Sedona "murder-suicide" after a young woman is found mutilated in a police officer’s basement, his confession scrawled on the wall above his dead body. Sounds like a straightforward who-done-it? Hey, it's set in Sedona, so psychic powers, premonitions, angels and mystical experiences abound. For more paranormal mysteries, check out readers' recommendations at https://www.goodreads.com/genres/paranormal-mystery

Intriguing Mystery Plot Twists, Fictional and Real

Mystery lovers, by their nature, are lovers of the plot twist. Just a few of my favorites with surprise twists include Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, In the Woods by Tana French, Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Of course, the great Agatha Christie has multiple entries, such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Notice how often the "unreliable narrator" is key to the surprise twist, by the way. Sometimes fact is even more astounding than fiction, however. Just check out Listverse.com's post about 10 real-life mysteries solved by incredible plot twists. For example, there's seven-year-old Maria Ridulph's 1957 murder solved by a "murder will out" twist 54 years later. Although 17-year-old neighbor John Tessier was suspected of Ridulph's murder at the time, he had an iron-clad alibi: He had taken a train trip on the day the child disappeared. The police reopened the case in 1994 after a deathbed statement by Tessier's mother, but the alibi had them stumped--until one of Tessier's ex-girlfriends helpfully provided an old framed photograph. Investigators found the 1957 train ticket hidden inside, unstamped because Tessier had never used it to take the trip. Tessier was finally charged with murder in 2011. Science, not luck, played the key role in another seemingly insoluble murder. After a 13-year-old girl was found stabbed to death in 2011 in Italy, police took 15,000 DNA tests to compare with DNA samples found at the murder scene. One man's near-match led to testing of his family, including a long-dead uncle and the uncle's children--without an exact match. Police then learned the dead uncle had been a very active womanizer, and 500 women were investigated. Police finally found a married woman whose twins turned out to be the secret offspring of the dead uncle. One of the twins was a match for the killer's DNA, and he was charged with murder in 2014. For more real-life twists, read http://listverse.com/2015/03/25/10-mysteries-resolved-by-unbelievable-surprise-twists/.

Regional Mystery Rewards Sleuth and Tourist

Sometimes the setting of a mystery novel goes beyond a dash of "local color" into the realm of regional fiction, offering a special atmosphere, unique characters and local accents so integral to the story that it's hard to imagine the same plot in another place. Here are just a few regional mysteries that may appeal to fellow armchair detectives and tourists. Take a trip to New Mexico and its blend of Hispanic, Native American and Anglo cultures courtesy of the late Tony Hillerman; Skinwalkers or A Thief of Time is a good first read. Closer to home for me, Raymond Chandler may have been the pioneer of Los Angeles noir, but Michael Connelly is a worthy heir, winning every major award given to mystery writers, with his novels featuring LAPD detective "Harry" Bosch and defense attorney Mickey Haller. I also like Jonathan Kellerman's L.A.-based series with child-psychologist sleuth Alex Delaware, starting with the award-winning debut When the Bough Breaks. On the opposite coast, Dennis Lehane draws powerful, wrenching literary mysteries out of a gritty Boston landscape; a great example is Mystic River, winner of multiple book awards. Or follow the cases of the late Robert B. Parker's Boston private detective Spenser; with so many books in the series, a good start is Edgar Award-winning Promised Land. If New York City tops your tour agenda, Linda Fairstein and her Manhattan prosecutor Alexandra Cooper provide satisfying reads, including Nero Award-winning The Deadhouse. If you think drizzly gloom is the perfect setting for murder and mayhem, you'll be drawn to J.A. Jance's Seattle-based detective J.P. Beaumont series, starting with debut Until Proven Guilty. Or you can move further north to the wilder shores of Alaska, and meet Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak, kicking off the series with Edgar Award-winning A Cold Day for Murder. There are a lot more regional mysteries worth sampling, of course. For more suggestions, take a look at the post by Marvin Lachman, author of The American Regional Mystery, at http://somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2012/10/17/the-american-regional-mystery-by-marvin-lachman/