Me: I’m traveling on a paddle steamer from New Orleans to Memphis, and Mosey has agreed to meet me at the marina in Hembree. I’m here now on the veranda overlooking the river. It’s a warm March evening just before sunset, and Mosey’s making her way across the swinging foot bridge. It’s a quick stop, so I’ve already ordered a couple of mojitos, Mosey’s favorite cocktail. Here she comes now.

Have a seat, Mosey, and since we don’t have long, let’s get down to brass tacks. Tell me, Ms. Mosey Frye, who are you anyway?

Mosey: Who am I? Hard to say. Strictly speaking, my name isn’t Mosey. It’s Anne Moseby Frye, Moseby being my mother’s maiden name. Mosey’s a nickname my childhood friends gave me. I’m married to Robert Ellison and live in Hembree, Arkansas. Marriage and birthplace ought not define a person, right? But they have me, to a degree. I studied music at Blanchard College here in Hembree and aspired to be an opera singer or, if not that, a juke singer, but—

Me: Excuse me. Opera or juke?

Mosey: I know, they’re opposites, but they are my preferences. I occasionally sing at Al’s Super Club, and not long ago, with a slap on the back and a big yeehaw, Al offered me a job. My present occupation as a real estate agent at Shepherd Realty is not especially to my liking, and Big Al knows that. But until I find something more interesting, I’ve settled into real estate—more accurately, real estate as a side gig to sleuthing, given that every time I list a house a murder soon follows.

Me: Looks like bodies have piled up in Hembree since you started selling houses.

Mosey: Yeah, they have.

Me: Isn’t that a tad stressful? And how do you manage what amounts to two jobs?

Mosey: It was stressful at first. I knew the first victim, Crump, a cotton broker. He lived around the corner from us. But a half-dozen homicides latter, I don’t mind so much. I’ve come to think of myself as an amateur detective.

Me: Could you give us a hint about a couple of these cases?

Mosey: Well, at the Eldridge house, known as Sunny Banks, I found a dead body hunched over the steering wheel of Martin J. Eldridge’s Tyche XL500. That was the last incident. About a month before that, I stumbled on human remains in a cistern near the summer house at Larkspur Plantation. That same day the overseer Frank Ferguson stopped off at the hermitage near St. Mary of the Angels Church and found Sister Clare bleeding out behind a big clump of sunflowers. Back in the spring, Hugh Jessup and I—Hugh’s my husband’s colleague in Anthropology at Blanchard—were poking around a deserted mansion and came across a head pot with clues to an old murder.

Me: Good grief, Mosey, I think I’d be looking for another job.

Mosey: Naw. My friends say I’ve got the joy gene, and I guess I do. I just think of it this way: Mosey Frye, Specialist in Stigmatized Properties. Ha!

Me: That’s funny. I don’t want to talk out of school, but there’s a rumor you converse with ghosts.

Mosey: Ha-ha! Who told you that? No, never mind. I know who told you—Nadia, didn’t she?

Me: Could have been.

Mosey: Nadia’s my best friend. She runs Abboud Antiques near the Square. I finally got around to telling her about my conversations with my late father. You see, Daddy died about eight years ago, and he and I were very close, given Momma passed away when I was just a kid. Actually, I do hear his voice rather often.

Me: What does he say?

Mosey: He gives me the same advice he’s given me all my life: don’t do this; stay away from that.

Me: You pay him any mind?

Mosey: Of course, not.

Me: Huh. By the way, Nadia mentioned something else. She said you have a curious way of proceeding with your, uh, investigations. Something about chimpanzees and bonobos?

Mosey: Oh, that. At the open house at Waite House—that was my first listing—I picked up one of a handful of books I’d brought over for staging, you know, to make the place look homey. Flipping through the book, I came to a chapter on chimpanzees and bonobos, i. e., the traits we inherited from our ape ancestors. As I interviewed my people of interest, I started seeing them as bonobos if they were nice or chimpanzees if they weren’t.

Me: I know that book. Our Inner Ape by Franz de Waal?

Mosey: That’s right.

Me: One last question. Once you’ve figured out who done it, are you shocked, or had you suspected it all along?

Mosey: I’d say shocked. You see, small towns hide a multitude of secrets—you’d be surprised.

Me: Hate to say it, but our time’s up. It’s been a pleasure, and next time I’m through here, let’s have supper at Al’s, and I’ll be expecting a song or two, okay?

The Summer House at Larkspur, A Mosey Frye Mystery Book #4
Genre: Traditional
Release: January 2023
Format: Print and Digital
Purchase Link

When Mosey Frye, real estate agent and amateur sleuth, hunts for a summer house on the grounds of an abandoned plantation, she finds not only the house but also skeletal remains at the bottom of an old cistern. That same day, news of the horrific stabbing death of an eremitic nun leaves the citizens of Hembree in hang-jawed shock. Given that the tumble-down estate belonged to the dead nun’s family, Mosey insists there must be a connection between the two events. But Police Chief Gus Olivera, predisposed against Mosey and the Church, scrambles to find a suspect among members of the clergy. Will Olivera solve one on his own? Or will his hopes be dashed when Mosey, once again, drops the clue that points to the killer?

Meet the author
Never did Kay expect to live in Northwest Arkansas, but here she is in Fayetteville, decades after returning from Seville, Spain, to teach Spanish literature at the state’s flagship university. At retirement in 2016, she threw herself into fiction writing and finished the first four mysteries in the Mosey Frye Mystery series, published by The Wild Rose Press. Her protagonist for these stories is Mosey Frye, real estate agent and amateur sleuth, and her setting, except for The House with the Corner Door, is the Mississippi River Delta—or maybe not it exactly but, rather, a blending of what it once was and what she wishes it to be. Books 1, 2, and 3 were anthologized as Murder in High Cotton (2022), and Book 4, her first full-length novel, was issued separately as The Summer House at Larkspur (2023). Book 5, The Incident at Sunny Banks, is currently in production and will be out later this year.

All comments are welcomed.