💡🐇 Naughty Thoughts

꩜ Shedunnit

OK, I like this idea, but the title is pretty cringe. Probably need a better one.

A country house, an exclusive hotel in the middle of nowhere. People rich, successful, powerful, or all three. A dozen people, and a small number of staff.

One of the guests, Lady Carlotta, has done terrible things in the past. She has, however, been cornered by a skilled vigilante hypnotist. She cannot resist the suggestions she's been given, no matter how hard she tries. Several of the people present were victims of her crimes, either directly or indirectly. Those people have each been given a special privilege by the vigilante, detailed by a set of instructions in an anonymously-delivered envelope. They can give Lady Carlotta one command, which she must obey completely and without question.

The other people present don't all know what she was guilty of. Some of the victims were only hurt indirectly, so they get a letter offering them a single command (or a limited number for some people) to get their revenge, but they don't know why. Some of them might be secretive about it, denying their involvement; and when people at the hotel are all talking about the weird cards, some people might pretend to have them when they don't.

Tina Zdravinski is a cop. She's one of the best in her department, but has been caught between a rock and a hard place by department restructuring which will likely cost her her job. But she has one last chance: A senior officer has a hunch that something fishy is going on at this remote resort, and wants her to investigate. Once she finds out what's happening to Carlotta, she knows she can make or break her career here. Whether it's getting a proper confession for whatever Carlotta did, or tracking down the vigilante, either way it's an important case. The presence of celebrities proves that.

So we've got a few things going on at once. Tina is trying to find out what the crime(s) were and/or who the vigilante is. And Lady Carlotta is going through obeying all the commands. All the classic whodunnit ingredients, but without the "who". Like an EMC version of "And Then There Were None".

What the reader might not realise the first time around is that when Tina is aware of a command that's been given, she automatically acts to make sure nobody else interrupts or prevents it from happening. When all the victims got cards/letters with the trigger phrase on to command Carlotta, Tina tried to work out who could have delivered those cards, and found that everyone present had alibis or something else. That's because she discounted herself as a suspect.

Tina's senior officer is the hypnotist/vigilante. And he used Tina to seduce Carlotta on the first night, flirting more effectively than she ever would on her own, getting Carlotta back to her room, drugging her drink, setting her up to listen to a recording on a loop all night, and then forgetting all about it. He'd put a lot of effort getting all these people together, and he knew he'd never even get close to Carlotta himself because she knows him and all his tricks. Maybe they used to work together as grifters, or he was her mentor before he went over to the other side of the law.