Top Psychological Thrillers Have a Feminine Face

Best-selling mystery-thrillers like Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies have won fans and movie renditions because of cleverly deceptive psychological plotting. There's an interesting trend in these novels: To create their surprise twists, the authors rely on the unreliable narration of troubled female protagonists and a claustrophobic domesticity that is distinctly feminine. Forensic evidence, genius detectives, and serial killer foes do not power these story lines. Instead, they turn inward to the dark places of the female psyche and relationships, and maybe it is precisely because of today's #MeToo female empowerment and growing emancipation from female stereotypes (damsel in distress, romantic ingenue, wise-old-lady sleuth) that this female psychological warping has come out of the shadows in the mystery world. If you are a reader who grabs a book when the blurb says "if you loved The Girl on the Train...," check out Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, a debut novel inspired by Knoll's own life, about a magazine editor forced to unearth her teenage memory of a traumatic assault and confront the mysteries in her own psyche. You may also like What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, which starts when a woman taken in by the police after a hit-and-run car accident claims to be the victim of a famous missing person's case from decades earlier. Lippman approaches the cold case police procedural in an inventive way that explores the deeper mysteries of human nature. With the sexual predation scandals of women's gymnastics in the news, there's something very topical about You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott, in which the sudden death of a young man in a car accident plunges a tight community of women gymnasts and their parents and coaches into crisis. For more options, see https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/books-like-girl-on-the-train-mysteries-thrillers

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/

Avoiding Cliches in Mystery Plot Twists

There's nothing worse than a mystery "plot twist" that you can see coming for many chapters ahead. There is an art to the plot twist that requires writers to avoid the obvious (the cruel stepfather) and gimmicks ("it was just a dream") and then to plant clues that obscure, redirect or contradict suspicions so that the final twist surprises and impresses readers by fitting the right puzzle pieces into a believable solution. Although there are very few plot devices that are completely original, some plot twists slip more easily into cliche if attempted by less skilled mystery writers. Here are some of my pet peeves. The first is a mystery tale that, in a desperate effort to create a twist, injects some last-minute new suspect, deus ex machina event, or unrealistic "coincidence." This abuses the basic mystery-solving pact with the reader. But I'm equally irritated by authors who create so many suspicious characters, red herring clues and dead-end turns that following the plot line becomes mentally exhausting. Then the eventual solution of the mystery goes from an "aha" moment to an "at long last" moment. Plot twists often focus on one of four characters: the victim, the suspect, the detective or the narrator. For victims, there's the old "I'm not really dead" resurrection (usually because the victim was trying to fool the law, an enemy, a loved one or an insurance company). Other victim surprises include mistaken identity or a twin/doppelganger killing. In the wrong hands, the not-a-real-victim twist undermines the mystery and reader interest. When it comes to suspects, plot surprises often involve a guilty "but who would ever think" character (the granny, the kid, the pretty girl) or a not-guilty "but sure looks like a villain" character, a la Harry Potter's Professor Snape. Writers can unwittingly flag a suspect by overly disguising a character as either too nice or too nasty. When it's the detective who delivers the plot twist, a dusty ploy is the surprise appearance of a character or motive from the detective's "tortured past." That so many fictional detectives are tortured (alcoholics, loners, etc. ) is another cliche worth discussing elsewhere! Finally, there's the "unreliable" narrator. This plot device has created some classics, like Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, but it's not easy to pull off (please don't have the killer's creepy italicized commentary throughout a story). And finally, it is not really a plot twist when a death ruled to be accidental or a suicide turns out to be (shock) a homicide. We know we're reading a "murder mystery" after all. For some examples of mysteries with critically acclaimed plot twists, see the https://the-line-up.com/plot-twists-books

Blindsided: Murder Mystery Plot Twists

Skilled mystery authors can use an ingenious plot twist to surprise and stump even veteran mystery readers. Here are some favorites that continue to inspire imitation and inventive variation. Let's start with the Narrator Culprit. Readers tend to trust the mystery narrator, especially if he or she is a victim, sympathetic witness or helpful aide to investigators, so it's a real shock to find out they've been bamboozled by a villain (and the author). It worked in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and the more recent Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The Impossible Murder twist is another favorite in which the evidence seems to contradict logic and science, including the many variations on the classic "locked room" murder. Read John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins for an ingenious example that includes a locked room death followed minutes later by the shooting death of the main suspect on a snow-covered street, surrounded only by his own footprints yet with a powder burn showing he was shot at close range. The Supernatural Killer is a popular way to play mind games with readers, too. There's often a spooky house, a ghost sighting, a curse, an old crime and a new one, and clues that fit both natural and supernatural explanations. A recent example is Tana French's The Secret Place, in which adolescent girls at a posh Irish boarding school claim to police investigators that they see the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder. Similarly, The Chinese Gold Murders, the second entry in Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee series set in ancient China, involves sightings of a murdered magistrate's ghost, as well as a murdered monk in the wrong grave and a tiger at large, events Judge Dee traces to a common cause to solve the mystery. Finally, there's the Not Really Dead Suspect ploy, in which the author misdirects reader attention away from a supposedly dead character as in Agatha Christie's famous And Then There Were None. For more classic plot twists courtesy of Queen of Mystery Christie, read http://flavorwire.com/537670/agatha-christies-10-best-plot-twists/10

Best-Seller Mysteries for Your Summer Reading

It's time to gather up mystery fare for the long, lazy days of summer. If you are a fan of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, you'll like two new best sellers. For those attracted to mean-girl protagonists, try Jessica Knoll's The Luckiest Girl Alive. Ani FaNelli has reinvented herself as a New York magazine writer, boasting a wealthy fiancé and a brand-name wardrobe, but the past threatens her perfect life when she agrees to participate in a documentary about a long-ago shooting at her fancy private high school. If twists by an unreliable narrator were your Gone Girl turn-on, then The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is your English cup of tea. Protagonist Rachel is a boozy, fantasizing mess who has been fired from her job but structures her days by continuing her London train commute, a trip that conveniently allows her to spy on the street where her ex-husband and his new wife live. She fantasizes about the street's other inhabitants, including a young couple, and when the young woman goes missing, Rachel injects herself into the police inquiry and the lives of the missing woman's husband and her own ex-husband. Of course, there are many well-known writers on the best-seller list this summer--James Patterson, David Balducci, John Sanford, etc.--but if you're tired of urban crime detectives, try these alternatives. First, how about a trip to Wyoming's high plains to meet Craig Johnson's Sheriff Walt Longmire? In Cold Bones, Longmire investigates whether a local Cheyenne man's murder is related to valuable dinosaur bones unearthed on his property. Another alternative detective is "enigmatologist" Jeremy Logan in Lincoln Child's The Forgotten Room. Logan is called in by a prestigious think tank to investigate the suicide of a respected doctor following suddenly bizarre behavior and, in the organization's sprawling mansion, discovers a secret room full of old equipment for mysterious experiments. Finally, Stephen King's 2015 Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes plays with the trappings of the hard-boiled detective story but transforms it with unlikely heroes, including a nervous 43-year-old spinster, who take on the unsolved murder of 23 people run down by a stolen car and then race to prevent the crazed killer from more deadly mayhem. For more options: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18

Have You Been Fooled by an Unreliable Narrator?

The popularity of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, now a hit movie, shows that the "unreliable narrator" is still a potent fictional device. The unreliable narrator is a fictional character--sometimes a protagonist, a witness to events or a third-party storyteller--who misleads the narrative audience (and eavesdropping real readers) by outright lies, concealment or omission of information, and misjudgment or misrepresentation, intentional or unintentional, of characters and situations. There have been many famous unreliable narrators in fiction. Children and naifs are naturally chosen for their poor skill at evaluating people and circumstances, a la Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A mentally disturbed narrator creates another type of unreliable voice; consider many Poe stories or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Characters also mislead to justify or reinvent their actions, like pedophile Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, or the fabulist Pi in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  There is an obvious utility in mystery writing to an unreliable narrator who can provide clues and red herrings while revealing and obscuring motives, all in order to take the reader the long way through the woods to that surprise turn that reveals the truth. One of the most famous mystery examples of an unreliable narrator is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This year, Sophie Hannah's paranormal mystery The Orphan Choir offers a seemingly unreliable housewife narrator who complains of hearing children singing liturgical music, music that appears to be all in her head--but maybe not. Now if an astute mystery reader wants to avoid being fooled by an unreliable narrator device, there usually are built-in clues. Consider signals such as narrator contradictions, unexplained memory gaps, lies to other characters, and negative reactions or contradicting input by other characters. Be alert when a narrator's story defies common sense, logic, normal experience or probability. But when a mystery is well written, it is probably more enjoyable to take the twists and turns with the unreliable narrator, right to that satisfyingly unexpected ending. For more examples of unreliable narrators in fiction, see http://flavorwire.com/410468/10-of-literatures-most-unreliable-narrators