It’s so cold out today I’m longing for a hot flash. That’s often the case because I live in the town of Hallock, a Scandinavian-Lutheran farming community of fewer than 1,000 people in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota. In other words, it’s usually too cold to get heartburn.

I’ve lived outside of Hallock my entire life, just like my dad, dontcha know. My mother, on the other hand, immigrated from Sweden in the early 1950s, as a young women. She fell in love with all things American, particularly the stars of the silver screen. That’s why I was christened Doris Day Anderson when I was born several years later. My sister, two years my junior, was named Grace Kelly Anderson.

Growing up, I worked alongside Dad, farming the same land his Scandinavian grandfather acquired from the government when he settled here in the 1870s. Uff-da, I didn’t mean to impose a history lesson. I only wanted to explain why I remained in a place where temperatures regularly dropped to forty degrees below zero during the winter. Where drunks routinely soaked their blue jeans in water, then held them up outside until they stood on their own, those same guys repeatedly experiencing frost-bitten legs.

Not long after high school, I married a local Irish-Catholic farmer and moved onto his place, living in his family’s Sears and Roebuck mail-order farmhouse. When he died a couple years back, after a massive heart attack while harvesting soybeans, I had that 1890 Victorian three-story relocated to the edge of town by way of a flat-bed trailer.

Then, my sister, Grace, who owns More Hot Dish, Please, the only café in Hallock, became my roommate. It was an offer I extended one lonely night and regretted on numerous occasions thereafter. Ninety-year-old Rose O’Brien, a family friend and a relative of my deceased husband, also ended up moving in. And that’s when the chaos ensued. Yeah, you betcha.

Naturally, the people of Hallock had experienced problems before. For instance, a deer hunter from town got drunk last year, passed out in the woods, and ended up a pre-hibernation snack for a surly black bear. But shortly after Grace and Rose came to live with me, a man actually got murdered. He was found in the dumpster behind my sister’s café. That’s right. Found among moldy buns and rancid tapioca pudding, his head bashed in.

For some reason, my two adult children were implicated in the crime, so I had no choice but to investigate, much to the chagrin of the local sheriff. But I’m their mother. I couldn’t leave it to law enforcement.

In the end, I literally stumbled upon the real killer and solved the case. But, now, less than four months later, there’s been another murder. Believe it or not, Rose, Grace, and I reeled in the victim while ice fishing. And, once again, I feel compelled to do some investigating. So, with the “help” of my sister, when she’s not cooking up a storm at the café and providing the recipes to my readers, I’ll do my best to solve this crime too.

It’s Murder You Betcha, An It’s Murder Mystery Book #2
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release: April 2024
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link

Move over Stephanie Plum, Betty Crocker, and the residents of Lake Wobegon. Retired farmer Doris Day Anderson Connor and her quirky friends and relatives are solving crime in the Scandinavian-Lutheran farming community of Hallock, in the northwest corner of Minnesota. This book, the second installment in the It’ s Murder series, has Doris and her sister, Grace Kelly Anderson, the owner of the local café, taking ninety-year-old Rose O’ Brien ice fishing. The day ends, however, with nothing to show for their efforts except a dead body. With Rose distressed over the crime, Doris feels compelled to make inquiries in an effort to move the murder investigation along, much to the chagrin of the sheriff, an old boyfriend and a current puzzle. While in the café, at a funeral, and during a gender-reveal-party blizzard, she uncovers answers, but she also learns secrets and lies that lead her to wonder if she truly knows the residents of her hometown. After all, at least one of them is a killer.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “an engaging and homey detective story” and the lead character “refreshingly funny.”

Meet the author
Jeanne Cooney is a humorist and author who writes quirky mysteries about life in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota. While the towns mentioned in her books are real, the stories are fiction. Each book in the Hot Dish Mystery series as well as the It’s Murder series is augmented with old-time country recipes. After all, what goes better with a murder mystery than laughs and hot dish and Jell-O salad? The next book in the It’s Murder series, It’s Murder, You Betcha, is due out in mid-April 2024.