Daughter of Mine

While Daughter of Mine may broadly be classified as a psychological thriller, it also falls into the subgenre of mysteries set in small towns. The stark contrast between a tranquil geographical setting and the violence perpetrated by humans who dwell in that setting has offered inspiration to mystery writers for well over a century. One of the earliest fictional detectives to contrast the beauty of nature with the evil of the human heart was Sherlock Holmes. When Holmes and Watson are called upon to investigate nefarious activities in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” (1892), Holmes mutters darkly, “The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside” (Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Doubleday, 1960, p. 323).

Arthur Conan Doyle’s darker perceptions of the smiling countryside were shared by some of mystery’s most famous authors during the British golden age of detective fiction. Agatha Christie based the entire Miss Marple series on a character who lives in the quaint village of St. Mary Mead. This tiny hamlet sees an inordinate number of murders for its size. Even though Christie set her Poirot series in London, the Belgian detective retires to the country in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). By the end of the novel, Poirot finds himself so appalled by the corrupt behavior of his village neighbors that he immediately returns to London to resume his detective practice. Another writer of the golden age, Dorothy L. Sayers, set one of her most complex Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries in a village in the Lincolnshire Fens. In The Nine Tailors (1934), Wimsey comes to much the same conclusion as Poirot about the corruptness of human nature no matter how beautiful the surroundings may be.

Decades later, television brought the small-town mystery subgenre to an even wider audience. The popular American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996) was set in the New England hamlet of Cabot Cove, the murder rate of which rivaled that of St. Mary Mead. In Britain, Midsomer Murders (1997- ) is based on the same formula of small-town misdeeds and has been on the air for more than two decades.

The appeal of the small-town murder subgenre is its focus on the premise that appearances are deceiving. This is a staple concept within the mystery genre as a whole, but the disjunction between appearance and reality is starker when the serenity of a small village is contrasted with the violence at its core. While Daughter of Mine grapples with the deceptive appearances that all small-town mysteries contain, author Megan Miranda moves beyond the generic formula of a detective who stands apart from the crime under investigation. Because her protagonist’s own life is on the line, the novel falls into the “fem-jep” (previously “women-in-jeopardy”) subgenre of women in peril. Miranda’s variation on an old standard proves that small towns still offer a rich source of inspiration for thriller and suspense authors more than a hundred years after Holmes first noted the human shadows that darken the sunny countryside.