Choosing a mystery novel victim

 

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My three mystery novels all introduce a victim in Chapter One. Winter's Rage, released this month, revolves around a hit-and-run collision that kills a pedestrian. My series sleuth, adjuster Paula Savard, investigates the resulting insurance claims and comes to suspect the hit and run was a murder. 

After I settled on this premise, I started to mull ideas for a victim. Aside from novels about random crimes, mystery plots focus on why someone killed a particular person. For me this is often more important than whodunit.

I can trace my ideas that emerged back to the 1990s, when friends started to tell me about their experiences with repressed memories. One confided that while listening to a radio program on the topic, she suddenly remembered that her father had sexually abused her when she was a child. She'd had no memory of this before, but from then on didn't doubt this had happened. 

Another friend said her sister had accused their older brother of similar abuse. Their parents believed her sister; my friend believed her brother. Not surprisingly, he became estranged from the rest of the family. My friend blamed her sister for making this up, but still got along with her parents despite some tension.   

During the recovered memory episode of the 1980s and early 1990s, I was at home looking after my children and watched daytime television talk shows on the subject. Thousands of people recalled forgotten memories of childhood abuse, spontaneously, like my friend hearing the radio show, or in therapy, sometimes aided by hypnosis. 

My interest led to me read books and magazine articles on both sides of the issue. While cases varied, a large number were young women who sought therapy for general problems and, in the course of treatment, recovered memories of their fathers abusing them when they were children. Therapists encouraged them to confront their families for healing. Typically, the fathers denied they'd done anything wrong, as people do whether they're innocent or guilty. Wives had to choose between believing their husbands or believing their daughters. Other family members took sides. Some daughters sued their fathers for the past abuse; a few fathers sued their daughters’ psychologists for malpractice. Courts of law accepted recovered memories as evidence. In 1990 a man was convicted of a twenty-year-old murder based on his daughter’s recovered memory of witnessing the event.

Today, psychologists heatedly debate the validity of recovered memories. Every time I Google the subject I come up with a different impression on where the profession stands on the issue. One article I read called it the most vicious controversy in modern psychology.

This all struck me as fertile ground for a mystery novel.     

I decided my victim would be a psychologist who'd treated a thirty-year-old woman for recovered memories in 1990. The woman's mother believed her; her twin sister sided with their father. He owns the hit-and-run vehicle that kills the psychologist in 2020, when my main storyline takes place. Paula, my insurance adjuster-sleuth, learns that the man blames the psychologist for tearing his family apart. But he denies he was driving that night. Is he lying? Or did someone else take his car and run the victim down for another reason? Paula’s job is to figure this out. More than that, Paula wants to help this fractured family. She hopes that solving the crime and uncovering the truth about what happened in their past will mend the family rift.