My name is Jamie Forest. I was born and raised in New York City. This spring, after a drug task force mistook me for a notorious dealer and detained me in a musty, smelly holding cell in Queens, I decided it was time to leave the big city. I settled into the old family cabin on Lake Larissa in the Northwoods of Minnesota.

I had this idea I could live happily in my cabin by the lake on the income of a freelance editor. Unfortunately, my MFA in nineteenth century women poets didn’t prepare me for the financial realities of cabin life. Emily Dickinson probably knew very little about the cost of building a new septic system or rewiring the cabin. My bank account looked a lot like the dying oak tree in the yard—shedding dollars like the tree shed leaves.

That’s why on this beautiful fall day with the maples and the aspens turning reds and yellows, I found myself in Cascade, the small Northern Minnesota town where, two years ago, a student had killed a teacher and two students in yet another school shooting. I planned to write a story on the Native American teacher who died with the hopes it might give a voice to the victims and, I’m embarrassed to say, generate some income.

The town with its empty storefronts had an air of desolation. So did the Cascade Bar and Grill complete with a dusty broken down juke box and duct tape repairs to the booths.

Winston Starling sat across from me at a wobbly table. So far, even two years after the shooting, he was the only person from Cascade High School willing to be interviewed. In his mid-twenties, slightly overweight with sandy hair and freckles, he hardly looked like my vision of a high school guidance counselor. With his gap tooth, he reminded me of Winnie the Pooh.

“Nice weather,” he commented as the server handed us the menus. He gazed at me with a knowing expression, “Enjoy it while you can. Winter is coming.”

People here were constantly warning about winter as if Manhattan had never seen cold weather.

The server studied me for a moment before she said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

She wasn’t the first person to ask that question. “I’m from New York.”

“Oh yeah, like those mob people we see on The Sopranos.”

To Minnesotans, we Easterners all sound alike.

Something about this town with its deserted main street and its rundown restaurant made me want to hurry through the interview, jump in my car and speed back to my cabin, my dog and the latest bad romance editing job.

Winston evaded my questions about the shooting and concentrated on eating his cheeseburger. I was about to ask him how the shooting had affected him as a counselor when I heard the saloon doors of the backroom bar open behind me. He glanced over my shoulder, and it seemed like the color drained from his ruddy cheeks. I turned to look and was surprised to see a tall, slender woman with sleek dark hair pulled into a tight chignon. She had the poise of a model and was definitely out of place with the local crowd. More surprising, she carried a Hermes Birkin handbag.

Who in this dying rural Minnesota town would own a $15,000 handbag?

After she left, Winston stood up, mumbled something about missing and appointment and left. My notebook was empty, my questions unanswered. I stepped out into the fall darkness to drive home, with an eerie feeling the town and people in it were holding back a dark secret.

When I reached my cabin with Bronte, my dog, wiggling with joy to see me, I took out the receipt for the cheeseburgers. Written in a loopy cursive was the warning, Stop your snooping. Little did I know that Winston Starling had just eaten his last cheeseburger and that I would become a suspect in his death.

Death of a Starling, A Cabin by the Lake Mystery #2
Genre: Traditional
Release: May 2021
Purchase Link

Jamie Forest is a native New Yorker now living in the old family cabin on Lake Larissa in the north woods of Minnesota. She’s eking out a living as a freelance editor.

Two years ago, in the small town of Cascade, a school shooting took the lives of three people, all Native American. The news about it died quickly. Jamie Forest decides to pursue a story about it after befriending one of the students who was injured. What she finds is a town cloaked in silence. Winston Starling, the high school guidance counselor, reluctantly agrees to meet with her at a local restaurant. He’s nervous and unwilling to give her direct answers. In the middle of their meal, he sees someone and abruptly leaves. Jamie has no story just a blank notebook and an eerie sense about the town.

Later that night, Winston is found dead—with her business card and her driving glove in his car. Jamie is launched into an investigation that goes beyond a school shooting deep into the dark side of this small, dying town.

Meet the Author
Linda Norlander is the author of A Cabin by the Lake mystery series including Death of an Editor and Death of a Starling. Besides her mystery novels she has published award winning short fiction, humor and non-fiction. Before retiring from a career in nursing she authored several books on end-of-life care. She currently resides in Tacoma, Washington with her spouse and (sadly) no pets. She can be found on lindanorlander.com as well as Facebook and Twitter.

All comments are welcomed.