7:00 am: Alarm. Contemplate the snooze button, resist. Wonder why it seemed like a good idea to leave a regular five-day-a-week job for one where I have to get up at seven on a Sunday.
7:25 am: Stumble from the shower into the kitchen (distance, about ten feet; my house is that small), load up the coffeemaker and set it on “kill.” Go on an expedition into the depths of the refrigerator, settle on a breakfast of two mystery empanadas. (When you own an artisan foods marketplace, you always have something around, but the selection can be unpredictable.)
7:45 am: Leave for marketplace. Wonder how I can tell Carmen that, while the roasted garlic and mushroom one was delicious, the world might not be ready for a squid empanada. (I certainly wasn’t.) The commute takes about five minutes, door-to-door, because the marketplace and the cottage I live in are on the same property, separated only by a field. Stop for a moment on the way to look out at the ocean, because there’s no point living on a hillside overlooking the Sonoma coast if you aren’t going to enjoy it. Then head out across the field, taking care to avoid the very aggressive geese that live there.
8:00 am: Marketplace vendors begin to arrive. First, as usual, is Julie, pulling up in the Dancing Cow Cheese van. Then the others—the delivery truck for Orlan’s Vegetable Market, Helen unloading jars of her famous kimchi for Pak Family Pickles, Carmen and Iryna with their empanadas and pierogis for The Corner Pocket, and Robbie, hauling in a freshly-cured leg of prosciutto from his farm for his shop, Cure. By opening time, the only empty stall is Lori’s Handmade Creations, which isn’t a surprise. Lori is late a lot. She never seems worried about it; I guess her hand-dyed textiles aren’t exactly going to go bad.
9:48 am: Lori finally shows up, not having missed much. Even though it’s August, business has been slow for a Sunday, probably because it’s been so cold. No one wants to go to the beach to sit in the fog. Crossing my fingers for a heat wave or we’re going to have a tough month.
11:30 am: Lunch time! It’s early, but I’m hungry. Robbie has been experimenting with selling picnic packs of his salami and mortadella (I know, but you really have to try it), and Julie always has a few odd ends of cheese, so I take the spoils to my office where I have some crackers and I can answer emails while I eat.
12:07 pm: Work emails done, time for a quick check of my personal account. The good news: my best friend Betty is holding a barbecue the Thursday after next at her guest ranch. I never miss a chance to see her, or eat her amazing food, if I can help it, so that’s an easy yes. I’d ask what I should wear, but Betty knows I only have two looks: casual and “you’re wearing that?” The bad news: there’s also a message from my neighbor, Nathan Rodgers, who hates the marketplace. This time it’s about the security lights I installed to keep the skunks away from our trash, which was the last thing he complained about. Delete email, back to work.
2:30 pm: Come in from the parking lot where an SUV mistook the ditch for a shortcut to the road, to find some French tourists arguing with Helen Pak about the definition of fermentation. Give it a couple minutes to be sure she has the situation under control, then go to my office to look up the number of the local tow company. There’s a manila envelope on my desk that wasn’t there when I left. Open it, look at the contents, figure out what they are, swear a bit.
5:25 pm: Still thinking about what was in the envelope: printed out pages from an online wholesaler of fabric items, with products that are identical to what Lori sells in her shop. My rules for the marketplace are clear: everything for sale must be made locally, by the seller. I’ll ask her for an explanation, but it’s hard to imagine I’ll have any option but to terminate her lease on the space.
6:38 pm: The marketplace is closed and almost everyone is gone. I asked Lori to stay around for a few minutes so I could talk to her about something. She seems annoyed, but I don’t think she guessed what it’s about. Wish me luck.
Murder Goes To Market is the first book in the NEW “Marketplace” cozy mystery series, released June 16, 2020 for e-books. Paperback will release on September 15, 2020.
If you had asked computer programmer Claudia Simcoe what she expected to come of her leaving San Francisco for the California coast to open a farm-to-table marketplace, “assembles a mismatched team to investigate a murder” would not have been her first guess.
Lori Roth is one of the tenants of the market, or she had been until Claudia learned that the hands making her “hand-dyed” textiles belong to overseas factory workers. Claudia terminates Lori’s lease, but her hopes that this will be the last she sees of her problem tenant are dashed when she arrives at the marketplace the next morning to find Lori dead, hit over the head with a jar of pickles and strangled with a cheese wire.
The police chief thinks Claudia looks like an easy pick to be the killer, and he closes the marketplace to put the pressure on her. So, Claudia has no choice but to solve the mystery herself. Relying on the tech skills from her previous life and some help from her quirky new friends, Claudia races to save her business and herself before the killer adds her to the region’s local, artisanal murders.
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Meet the author
Daisy Bateman is a mystery lover, cheese enthusiast, and world-renowned expert in Why You Should Buy That. Her educational background is in molecular biology from Caltech and UC Berkeley, and in what passes for normal life, she works in biotech. She lives in Alameda, California, with her husband and a cat, only one of whom wears a tuxedo on a regular basis. Visit her on Facebook.
All comments are welcomed.