Characters, all with motives––a secret affair, a lust for revenge of an old slight, a desire to inherit large sums––are confined together in a remote setting. One by one each person is mysteriously killed. How was someone able to enter the space where the crime occurred, murder his or her victim, and exit without seemingly leaving a clue? From popular examples such as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to the recent movie Knives Out, the formula of the locked-room mystery has had staying power for decades.

I play with the conventions of the locked-room mystery in my new novel The Unmasking. Three close friends, Bettina, Miriam, and Fiona, journey from Austin, Texas to Silver City, New Mexico to attend a women’s festival where they and others perform famous women from history including VIctoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for U.S. President in 1872), Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein.

The three stay in a secluded lodge, Oso Grande, in the Gila Wilderness of southwest New Mexico along with the lodge’s staff and four other participants of the event. Their university dean, Alec Martin, has just died in a one-car crash after it comes to light that he’s been embezzling funds. The three women suspect murder, particularly when it is revealed that his widow, Barbara, has inherited millions of dollars upon his death. But how might the crash have been orchestrated?

The reader knows early on who will die––the novel is less of a “whodunnit” than a “how-and-why-dunnit.” In the process of discovery, the form of the mystery novel itself is unraveled and put back together: random clues, the increasing isolation in the country, the friction between the faces the characters show in the novel’s present vs. the lives they play in history, the ongoing excavation of assignations and loyalties all add to the layers of action. The actual locked room inside the lodge, a small storage room with no windows, holds something utterly unexpected when it is opened.