Shopping Malls Can Be Sinister Places

It's that holiday gift-buying time of year when, even though most of my shopping has moved online, I may have one or two visits to the shopping malls. Though I dread the parking, the crowds, and trekking the maze of stores, I usually don't think of a mall as a sinister setting. Yet it doesn't take too much imagination to find their dark side. Consider What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn. The mystery starts in the 1980s when independent 10-year-old Kate, toting a toy monkey and a notebook of observations, plays detective in a newly opened shopping mall and befriends, Adrian, the 22-year-old son of a local shopkeeper. Then the little girl disappears and Adrian naturally comes under suspicion until, hounded by the press, he also vanishes. Jump to 2003. Now Adrian's sister Lisa is working as a manager at a discount record store in the same mall and becomes obsessed by security guard Kurt's surveillance-camera sightings of a little girl with a toy monkey. Lisa and Kurt develop an after-hours friendship as they join to investigate. Throw in Teresa, Kate's classmate who is now a detective, and you have a haunting mystery set in the eerie underground and locked stretches of the mall. In Silvermeadow, an entry in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla mystery series, a supermall outside London is the setting for two seemingly unrelated cases. A girl goes missing from the mall and then a violent criminal is spotted at the mall. Scotland Yard Detective Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla come to launch a manhunt for the wanted man centered on the mall, and their team uses the investigation into the missing girl as cover. But is there more than a coincidental connection? Finally, if you're looking for a thriller pro, try Nora Roberts' 2018 bestseller Shelter in Place, which starts with a mass shooting at a Portland, Maine, mall. After 8 minutes of carnage, the killers are taken down, but the terror doesn't stop for some survivors as they discover that another conspirator is lying in wait. Of course, it is the holidays, and for those who must brave the malls and so would rather keep their mall perspectives less disturbing, there are Laura DiSilverio's cozy Mall Cop mysteries: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=disilverio+mall+cop+series&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

Mysteries From the Viewpoint of a Witness

Most murder mysteries focus on the victim, the killer and the sleuth (detective, PI, prosecutor, etc.). But there is a third group of essential characters: the witnesses. Authors present witnesses and their narratives to the readers for evaluation based on the same elements used by legal teams. First, expertise and experience are key to witness credibility, ranging from specialized education to ordinary familiarity. Witnesses are also evaluated in terms of consistency, meaning both consistent telling of his or her story by the witness and consistency with input from other witnesses. A certain level of detail makes a witness more believable, too--as long as details don't vary with each telling. Readers (and jurors) also judge reliability by witness "demeanor," or a gut "feel" evoked by dress, body language, speaking style, and assumptions (perhaps wrong) about social, racial or ethnic background. Finally, perceived "neutrality" counts in how much weight readers are going to give to a witness; readers are more likely to suspect self-serving bias if the witness has a clear stake in the outcome, such as financial gain or a personal relationship. Witnesses don't have to be supporting cast members in mystery fiction. Authors can choose to unfold a story from the viewpoint of a witness for a number of good reasons: to mislead with partial or unreliable narration, to hide or highlight the reasoning of the detective, or to create empathy and emotional tension. A recent example of this is The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, in which the main character Rachel witnesses a shocking scene involving a couple she has observed during her daily train commute past their neighborhood, but her emotional problems, drinking and personal bias cause the police (and the reader) to question her reliability as a narrator. Another example where witnesses take center stage is Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect, in which Hercule Poirot solves the 16-year-old murder of a philandering painter, for which his wife was convicted, based solely on narratives of five witnesses. If you want a witness protagonist plus romance, check out The Witness by Nora Roberts, about a young woman who flees after witnessing a Russian mob killing and emerges years later in a small Ozarks town as a quirky freelance programmer protected by high-tech security systems, guard dog and firearms--and so she naturally attracts the sexy local police chief! Unfortunately, fictional justice does not necessarily mimic reality in terms of credible witnesses. Check out these 10 famous lying witnesses, and the miscarriages of justice that resulted from their false testimony: http://listverse.com/2015/08/04/10-people-who-brazenly-lied-on-the-witness-stand/