Sleuthing for Seniors
Lynley Cannon is a sixty-something cat shelter volunteer. Camelia Collins is a retired septuagenarian who moved to her dream house on the Oregon Coast. What do these two fictional characters have in common, aside from their senior citizen status? Through quirks of literary fate, they have become amateur sleuths.
Lynley, the hero of my Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mystery Series, was thrown into the investigation game when she, herself, was suspected of murder. Since the police seemed reluctant to look further afield once they had her in their sights, she turned to friends, family, and a hunky animal cop to help her find the real killer.
Camelia, too, was dropped into her investigating role when she discovered the cottage she’d purchased was the site of a cold case murder that proceeded to heat up when new evidence came to light in her living room. Camelia, star of my new Tenth Life Paranormal Series, enlisted a different sort of help—a ghost cat whose gravestone lies in Camelia’s back garden. Sometimes Soji is helpful, and other times, not so much.
Why do I choose heroes of a “certain age” instead of the twenty and thirty-somethings so popular in the cozy mystery genre? Firstly, they say write what you know, and I happen to be of that demographic myself. But there’s much more to my choice than egoism. I find the idea of a senior sleuth intensely satisfying. In so many ways, seniors are overlooked in our society. At some point, we become invisible, which is vastly unfair to a person whose only failing is age.
Invisibility is a useful attribute for a detective, however. An older person can get into and out of places that would be barred to a younger one. With a bit of theatrical dotage, we can walk into crime scenes without being noticed. By putting on a touch of righteous pomposity, we can ask the hard questions like a queen. Dare I say, we can be wily and sometimes downright devious if that’s what is required to get what we need.
Because we’re no longer young and athletic, we compensate in other ways. With age comes wisdom, or at least, experience. We’ve learned to separate the things that matter from those that don’t. We’ve learned to read people, to trust our instincts. Lynley and Camelia use their intellect to sort out their troubles, though their catlike curiosity has been known to backfire on them.
Speaking of cats, my ladies have one other thing in common—they are both cat people. Cats are major players in my stories, sometimes helping and sometimes hindering the ongoing search for clues. One can’t get much sleuthing done when the cat sits on your lap or walks across your keyboard. But that’s the fun of cats. And sometimes they save the day.
Cats’ Eyes
Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mystery, Book 1
What if a retired cat-lady found a stolen sixty-eight carat chunk of trouble in her backyard pond?
Lynley Cannon is the crazy cat lady, but she's not quite crazy yet, though a bizarre connection to a bumbled heist and a double homicide have got her wondering. When her elderly cat Fluffs drags in a dusky brown beach agate that turns out to be one of the stolen Cats' Eyes diamonds, things happen fast.
Theft, kidnapping, and murder—the police are baffled! Aided by friends, family, and a hunky animal cop, Lynley sets out to find the crooks herself. But the killer is desperate, convinced Lynley has the diamonds.
Will Lynley live to clean the litter box another day?
Buy Links
Thanks so much for posting my story!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Mollie. Come back any time.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your books, Mollie, and they always sell very well at events to both cat lovers and seniors as well as every other demographic. I also have a senior character in one of my series, and he's always popular for his endearing formality and manners, his wisdom and his insistence on order and tidiness, all foils for one of the main protagonists, who proves that opposites really do make the best friends, despite their differences. Relying only on young characters in books really does limit reader ages and interests, leaving a wide section of the population without characters they can relate to and root for.
ReplyDelete