Week 4 (Oct 4th-10th)

CBS's: NCIS- The Inside Man

A crispy dead body is found while lifting a pig at the yearly suburban Luau. B&B fight through the fake lifestyle of the neighborhood and find multiple sex scandals with the victim and women of the neighborhood. The team finds that a group of three neighbors outraged by the victim's actions finally had enough and killed him. In this episode we are also exposed to the real Arastoo and his fake accent.

FOX's: Bones- The beautiful day in the neighborhood:

Burns, a blogger, who recently blogged about NCIS covering up a case was found dead. The team now has to find Burns's killer and they have to prove their recent ruling of Arnett's death an accident to be correct. The team found that Burns was killed when Arnett's partner, in a $2 mil scam, heard Arnett's death might not have been an accident. However, Arnett's death was an accident and his partner, Sutton, scared to lose his money killed Burns.

NBC's: Law & Order- Great Satan

A man in attempt to save his "kidnapped" daughter shot a man, Caruso, while searching in a trashcan. The trashcan contained the ransom money for his daughter's kidnapper. Caruso lived through the shooting. The phone of the daughter's fake kidnapper was tapped and from it planned terrorist events were overheard. The kidnapper, Sameer, was in conspiracy with other bombers to blow up a synagogue. However, the cops managed to prevent the synagogue from being bombed but accidentally aided in another bombing.

Summary:

The episode that I felt was the best this week was Bones. The episode included twists such as the victim, Kurt, was having sexual relations with multiple people two of which were mother and daughter. An unexpected event happened in the end of the episode when the murder turned out to be murders (a group of angry neighbors). Also, a sense of suspense was created with the large amount of possible suspects. This episode made it difficult to guess who was guilty which is good for any mystery.

Each week in my post I argue which episode is the best and in doing so I consider what makes a good mystery and which episode to me was most entertaining. However, let's take a look at what a fellow blogger thinks makes a good mystery.

In early 2008, blogger Peggy Ehrhart depicts her experience at a program run by the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America. The purpose of this event and the point that Ehrhart is explaining in her blog is the components of a good mystery. She says this is one of the things that a successful mystery needs:
No matter what the subgenre, mentors cautioned that police work must be handled believably.

Several pointed out that even if a project is an amateur-sleuth cozy, police will show up when there is a murder. A scene in which a dead body is discovered but police never appear will strike the reader as unbelievable. And when police come, they have to do things that police would realistically do, such as establish a crime scene and summon detectives and CSI people, even if, because of the nature of the project, the technical details of these tasks aren’t dwelled on.

Erhart is stating that when criminal events such as murder occur and a dead body is found police need to be present in a story and they need to act in a manor that police do. I agree with this in order for a mystery to be well written the events that occur should not only occur to benefit the plot but also be true to nature.