Mishawaka in other people's fiction

1875–2025 · THE OUTSIDERS' CITY, AT EVIDENCE STRENGTH

The founding fiction. The most consequential fiction ever set on this ground is the one the city is named for in its own imagination: Flavius J. Littlejohn's 1875 story collection, in which a Michigan judge and author invented "Mishawaha," the Shawnee princess whose legend the Story of Mishawaka section of this record tests and prints whole. That belongs to the legend's file; it is entered here as a pointer only, to mark the shape of everything after it — Mishawaka enters outsiders' fiction first as a romance, and the record of the real place has been answering it ever since.

The modern case. The documented modern instance is a bestseller. The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers, with Alex Kiester (Bantam, 6 May 2025), sets its psychological thriller squarely in Mishawaka: Nicole Monroe, twenty-four, working the same dead-end job she has held since high school in her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana, seven years after her older sister Kasey vanished — her car found a hundred miles away, door open, purse untouched — joins the sister of a second vanished girl to hunt what the book's readers are told to call the Missing Mishawaka Girls. Flowers, the Indianapolis-based host of the Crime Junkie podcast and the author of the bestselling All Good People Here (2022), is an outsider to the city; the publisher's own framing sells the Mishawaka setting as the book's ground, and the trade placed it among the year's best mysteries set in the Midwest. Beyond this one title, the catalogs and lists reached surfaced no older novel of standing set in Mishawaka — the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which filled shelves with the city's own histories, left its fiction to the legend and, in the end, to a true-crime podcaster's thriller. The negative is printed at the strength of the search, which is named in this section's note.

Sources:

1. Penguin Random House (Bantam) and Hachette's Novel Suspects, "Best Mysteries Set in the Midwest" — The Missing Half (6 May 2025; ISBN 9780593727003), the Mishawaka setting and the sisters' premise in the publisher's summary, Flowers's standing as the Crime Junkie host and the author of All Good People Here.
2. Spine (this record) — the Littlejohn collection of 1875 and the Princess legend's test, whole.