If you’d asked me this six months ago I would have said that this thirty-one-year-old, successful advertising executive spends her jam-packed days creating irresistible reasons for consumers to buy her clients’ products in cosmopolitan Chicago.

But all that changed the day I received notice that my great uncle Tobias Finn had passed and left me the family farm clear across the country in Santa Barbara, California. I’d visited the farm once as a child and what I’d remembered from that trip about farming wouldn’t fill up the space on a matchbook cover. But on the plus side I would again be living close to my best childhood friends, brother and sister Beau and Diane Mason. They would help me decide if I should stay and make a go of it or sell the farm and look for the next chapter in my life.

Little did I know that my fate had already been decided the first night that I slept in the generations-old, beautiful Spanish farmhouse surrounded by undulating slopes of green and red crops of tomatoes and strawberries. The next morning when we discovered a young man’s dead body among my tomato vines it was clear that before anything else could happen I needed to solve a murder. I enlisted the help of friends Beau and Diane, and the willing skeletal staff of the farm in my pursuit. But in my wildest dreams I would never have imagined that my sleuth squad would be led by a baby pig named Horse, (because he eats like one), and his best friend, Mrs. Robinson, (so named because an oldies radio station had been playing Simon and Garfunkel at the time).

I now wake up with the roosters and while I know the chores that I’ve planned to complete each day, a farm is a living, breathing organism full of plants and animals that have minds of their own. First thing in the morning on Horse’s mind is breakfast so I know that I’ll always find my pink little pig at the trough in the paddock. Sometimes Mrs. Robinson is at her post on his shoulder but some days I finding her resting in the shade after a night conquering destructive aphids with her army of ladybugs. At some point in the morning the geese will come by to visit and it is not unusual for a vocal arrangement to break out from the choir of birds, goats, a beautiful chestnut roan and a pink pig named Horse.

Dead on the Vine is the first book in the NEW “Finn Family Farm” cozy mystery series, coming April 7, 2020.

Reluctant farmer Charlotte Finn needs the help of the livestock to sleuth a mysterious death.

Charlotte Finn never wanted to inherit the family’s produce farm–much less plow a heap of money into it. Her plan is to hammer a great big FOR SALE sign into the farm’s fallow furrows–but Charlotte’s sunny hopes of a quick sale succumb to a killing frost when she finds a dead body entwined supine in the tomato vines. The poor man, it seems, was run through…with a pitchfork?

Now, Charlotte is stuck with running the farm in the midst of a murder investigation. Charlotte’s knowledge of farming is smaller than her bank balance, so she relies on caretakers Joe and Alice Wong and their farmhands. Can she trust them? She doesn’t know them. There’s also farmer Samuel Brown, who still carries a childhood grudge. But the case gets personal when Charlotte learns that the victim might have been her own kin–and seeds of suspicion grow into a fertile field of suspects.

Charlotte turns to the farm’s baby pig to help root out the killer. Soon, the goats, geese, and horse join in, but will Charlotte harvest a murderer–or buy the farm?

Perfect for fans of B. B. Haywood and Peg Cochran, Elle Brooke White’s whimsical series debut is full of farm fun, complete with a helpful baby pig.

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Meet the author
Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Elle Brooke White became a world traveler at a young age when her family moved to Europe. She grew up in Paris, Brussels and London until returning to the US to attend Vassar College. She then moved to New York City with the hopes of becoming a renowned actress but took a job in advertising– as Elle says “just until.” But it was time for her to return to “a world of pure imagination”. Now Elle lives in Southern California with her famous diving dog, Bardot.

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