YMMV / The Cinderella Murder

• Captain Obvious Reveal: It's extremely obvious that the Dark Secret Nicole knows about Martin Collins is that he's a paedophile. In one of the first sections to focus on him he's overly-fixated on a twelve-year-old girl in his congregation and plans ways to see her at her home, and he mentions that the cops used to look at him suspiciously if he hung around playgrounds. Nicole also mentions that when they were in a relationship, she was a teenager eleven years his junior and looked younger. How Nicole found out - she literally walked in on Martin abusing a girl after vehemently defending him to Susan - is still fairly shocking though.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: While it's never discussed if she has a mental condition, a lot of Madison's behaviours are reminiscent of Histrionic Personality Disorder. She's obsessed with getting fame and attention, to the point of doing some morally shady things to accomplish that. She’s impulsive and easily bored, mentioning that she's changed relationships, political ideologies and lifestyles multiple times over her life (including three divorces). She’s often dramatic and flirtatious when interacting with people, craves others’ approval, fixates on always looking her best and is sensitive to criticism. People tend to see her as manipulative, shallow and egocentric. She occasionally perceives her relationships with others as deeper than they really are; after twenty years of minimal contact she’s still desperately in love with Keith despite him obviously only viewing her as a fling. She also uses people to benefit herself and appears to lack truly close relationships. Notably, her main concern in appearing on Under Suspicion is to get publicity, despite her being asked participate because she's a murder suspect (and the victim was her so-called friend)
• Fridge Brilliance: Madison Meyer was 19 and in her sophomore year at UCLA in 1994, meaning she was likely born in 1975. Her first name seems unusual and even anachronistic given that prior to the 1980s, Madison was almost never used as a first name for girls; it was more common as a boy's name (it means "son of Matthew" or "son of Maude") until the 1984 movie Splash popularised it as a girl's name, inspired by the film's mermaid protagonist, to the point it made it into the top ten most popular girls' names in the US by the 1990s. However, it makes a lot more sense when Madison explains that she actually changed her name in college to seem trendier and to make herself stand out (her birth name is Meredith); she could even hypothetically have been inspired by the movie herself, which would've come out when she was about 9.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Richard Hathaway crossed it twenty years ago when he murdered Susan in order to shut her up, as she refused to go along with his fraudulent and unethical plan for launching REACH. While Hathaway was already pretty shady, he having slept with students at his college and manipulated the vulnerable Dwight Cook - who looked up to him - into helping him commit intellectual property theft and fraud, chasing down and strangling his nineteen-year-old student (and trying to frame Frank Parker for it) purely from greed is what really put him over the MEH.
  • Martin Collins crossed it long ago by molesting a ten-year-old girl (who was likely not his first victim either), then threatening to kill his eighteen-year-old girlfriend and everyone she loved if she ever told anyone (and she knew he wasn't bluffing). He continues to take advantage of his position in his megachurch to molest dozens of girls; while he also embezzles millions of dollars donated to the church by people hoping to help the needy and has used violence and intimidation to prevent people from saying anything bad about the church, everyone agrees that his abuse of vulnerable children is the worst thing about him.
• The Woobie:
  • Rosemary Dempsey is extremely easy to feel sorry for. Her Establishing Character Moment reveals she's suffered anxiety for much of her life, stemming back to her mother being overly-critical and expecting her to fail (Rosemary recalls how proud she was of the chocolate upside-down cake she would make for her father every birthday, only for her mother to spoil it by revealing she would always make a back-up cake just in case it failed). Rosemary had managed to build a wonderful life with a gorgeous house, a husband she adored, the beloved daughter they thought they'd never have and lots of friends...then all her worst anxieties came true when her daughter was murdered. Rosemary has spent two decades not knowing who killed Susan or why, and has had to endure hearing all kinds of salacious rumours about her daughter's death, including from people she'd chosen to trust and open up to in the hopes of solving the case. By the main events of the novel, she's been widowed for three years (believing that grief for Susan drove her husband to an early grave) and couldn't bear living alone in the house where she had once been so happy, moving to a gated community where she struggles to befriend people, as inevitably her daughter's murder will come up. And then when she finally manages to strike up a friendship with her neighbour, the woman is brutally killed in Rosemary's own backyard.
  • Dwight Cook. He's likely on the autism spectrum, which wouldn't be a problem in and of itself if it weren't for the way other people treat him because of his "personality quirks". Growing up, his father would get angry with him for being "weird" and would try to force him to act 'normal'. Dwight had difficulty making friends because of his struggles with social interaction, including being bullied on occasion. He was eventually diagnosed with ASD, but this just made things worse for him, as he was put into a special needs class despite not having much difficulty learning and found that the teachers treated him like he was stupid. It got so bad Dwight demanded his parents put him back in regular classes or he'd run away. Dwight's university mentor and future business partner Richard Hathaway always treated him more as an equal and believed in him... or at least that's what he wants Dwight to think; it becomes obvious that Hathaway also looks down on Dwight as someone he can manipulate for his own gain. One of the few people who truly didn't judge, look down on or take advantage of Dwight was his research partner Susan Dempsey; Dwight fell in love with Susan, but he was never able to confess his feelings to her before she was murdered. Dwight still loves and mourns Susan twenty years later, and he's driven to find out who killed her. He figures out that his friend Hathaway killed Susan out of greed; Hathaway then betrays Dwight even further by murdering him when he refuses to buy Hathaway's excuses and stay silent.

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