The following plot scenarios all suspend belief in some way. They are so far-fetched that it is difficult for the reader to believe them. Though there are exceptions to every rule, It is best to avoid clichéd plots scenarios such as these.
The Evil Twin
The person responsible for the murder is a twin brother or sister. Often, the killer is an identical twin or a twin the person never knew she or he had. A variation of this idea is the person who thinks he/she has a twin but doesn’t. His or her “evil side” is committing the crimes and blaming them on a nonexistent twin.
Double or Multiple Personalities
Closely related is the plot idea where the crimes are being committed by an alternate personality. In this scenario, the narrator committed the crime and doesn’t realize it until the end of the book. The story consists of the hero/heroine wondering why all of his/her friends and the people closest to them are turning up murdered. The narrator usually awakens with a knife in hand.
The Big Dream
The story is all a dream or fantasy—none of it ever really happened. When the narrator finally wakes up, so does the reader, who often feels cheated because the author has wasted his time.
The Amnesia Victim
The narrator of the story has been hit on the head and has forgotten that his wife tried to kill him. Everyone knows but him. Another variation is that the amnesia victim committed the crime but because of a convenient case of amnesia, forgot all about it and spends most of the book looking for the killer, which happens to be himself.
The Talking Corpse
The person narrating the story has been murdered. The book begins with a “talking corpse”, usually a dead body lying on the floor either stabbed or shot, and the narrator is a voice from heaven telling how he got that way. The problem with this scenario is that when the narrator is already dead, it takes most of the suspense out of the book because the reader knows the outcome of the story from the start--he's not going to make it through this alive.
The Ghost Narrator
The narrator is a ghost . But The Lovely Bones was a great success, wasn’t it? Yes, once in a decade someone gets this plot idea to work. But it’s usually not a good idea to have a dead person or ghost telling the story unless they have something deep and meaningful to say that can’t be told any other way.
Authors are sometimes able to make good, even best-selling stories out of these hackneyed plots, but only if they provide a very unique twist.
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