Shortly before I retired in 2011, my husband gave me my first e-reader. We had bought a thirty-foot travel trailer a few years before and had become avid campers. One day that spring, I realized I didn’t have a book to take along on that weekend’s camping trip and thought it would be fun to find a camping mystery. There were none on Amazon for adults.
I had wanted to be a writer all of my life, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Campgrounds offer a lot of options for cozy mysteries. After all, what’s cozier than a campfire or a sleeping bag? But there’s also an abundance of risks and mishaps in a campground to provide fodder for a plot.
People ask me where I get my ideas. I reply that I don’t make anything up--we’ve either done it or seen it. Except for the dead bodies, of course. In any given campground, at least some of the campers are newbies, and accidents happen backing into a site, hooking up to water, building a fire, setting up a camper, etc., and no one is immune. Throw Mother Nature into the mix, and anything can happen.
My Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries follow the adventures of two retired couples, Frannie and Larry Shoemaker, Larry’s sister Jane Ann, and her husband, Mickey Ferraro. I wanted my characters to be retirees who are realistically drawn—not like twenty-somethings only without jobs, but also not decrepit invalids, either. I wanted them to have stable, comfortable marriages and solid friendships despite their quirks. And I wanted their life experiences to be valuable in solving the mysteries that they encounter. They have a few infirmities, but they don’t hobble around. The women don’t wear housedresses or pincurls. You see, as an octogenarian myself, I resent that elderly stereotypes seem to be the last to fall.
Larry is a retired small-town cop, Frannie and Mickey taught junior high, and Jane Ann was a nurse. The four, along with some other friends, camp in Iowa State parks as well as Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, and Minnesota. So each book has a different locale which opens up more plot lines. Also, each focuses on a different activity that many campers pursue, such as biking, hiking, county fairs, flea markets, sightseeing, and buck skinners’ rendezvous.
Readers enjoy the good-natured bantering among members of the group, especially Larry and Mickey, as they go about solving the mystery. Each book also includes recipes and camping hints, many sent to me by readers. There are now ten books in the series, plus a prequel and a collection of all the recipes and hints.
My ‘research’ for the books takes place on my camping trips, first with my husband for many years, and then after he passed away, on my own in a small motorhome I have named Agatha after Agatha Christie. She's pictured above.
A Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mystery, Book 1
Camping can be murder. Oh, sure, there's the stunning scenery, socializing with old friends and new acquaintances, amazing food cooked outside, and so on. But what if a dead body turns up on one of your hikes-for-fun-and fitness?
Frannie and Larry Shoemaker, retired baby boomers, are looking forward to a relaxing Fourth of July weekend with friends in beautiful Bat Cave State Park in Eastern Iowa. They begin with a wonderful meal and some laughs over the antics of nearby novice campers. But when someone kills the campground host and Frannie's group discovers the body, their favorite getaway becomes a quasi-prison, and the eccentricities often seen in a campground are viewed as suspicious behavior. A severe weather threat and the possibility that the murderer could be either a campground resident or an intruder from the outside compounds the danger. Frannie, while naturally curious, is warned off by her retired-cop husband, but still stumbles on information making her a target of the killer. At the same time, Frannie is working through the recent loss of her mother and an uncomfortable relationship with one of her own camping group.
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