My story involves direct threats to my protagonist, but those threats are marionettes in the hands of a master villain. I'd like to have the puppet master felt throughout the series, though we won't actually meet him until several books into the series. I'm just not sure how to keep him there, but off-screen.
Maybe take a look at how this was done multiple times in the X-Files. I don't know if that's helpful, but it's the first thing that came to my mind.
Sauron in Lord of the Rings. We never see him at all. Maybe that one time with Pippin in the crystal ball. Of course, the characters have to talk about him all the time to make him sound convincing. ETA: haha... Pippin autocorrects to "poop on"
My characters are unaware of the shadow villain until later in the series. When they come face-to-face, the shadow villain will rub it in that he's orchestrated everything and used my characters like pawns. It's only when they "misbehave" that he's had to intervene personally. I just don't want that to feel like it's something I've made up on the spot. Maybe my shadow villain is too powerful?
No such thing I would have the protagonists recognize that parts of what's happening around them don't add up, work explicitly to figure out the parts they don't understand (until they get sidetracked by something more pressing), and then when they meet the villain, they learn specific new information which fills in specific blanks that they had been investigating.
That...that is perfect. Thank you. I had sorta started doing something like that, but I hadn't quite arrived at that yet. At least two of my characters have some idea that things don't add up, given their special operations background. They see things that don't make sense to them, but keep it to themselves until it becomes necessary to figure out what really happened. The first book includes the zombie uprising in more detail than is usually seen in a book or movie in the zombie genre, so the priority for my characters in the first book is to survive. After that, they start to reclaim their place in the world, and that's a more appropriate time for them to figure out what doesn't add up.
