When your witness is a robot....

One of the hot topics among mystery writers is how to deal with current technology. After all, if our heroine is threatened these days, all she has to do is whip out her smart phone, call for help, and maybe film whoever is threatening her. She can even do a search for incriminating evidence or film suspicious activity.

That can make creating a mystery challenging. There are only so many times you can reasonably have your protagonist lose her cell – or have the battery run down, right? Well, the situation just got more interesting. Investigators in an Arkansas murder investigation want to access material from an Amazon Echo (aka, "Alexa"). This technology is always on and waiting for a voice prompt, so it may have heard something that could shed light on what happened that night, when a couple of buddies crashed after a night of beers and talk and one ended up floating in the hot tub... dead. Read more here.