Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Bessie Barr
Series: An OWL Ladies Cozy Mystery — Book 1 of 3 (reads as a standalone; Book 1 introduces the cast)
The Book:
New Year's Day, 1900. A brand-new century, a hard Texas frost—and a dead man floating face-down in the McKinney courthouse-square water tank. Minnie Mae Harper is sixty years old, armed with a basket of eggs and a lifetime of reading people, and she is, though the town would never suspect it, the most dangerous thing in Collin County.
When Leroy McMurtry turns up dead on the first morning of the twentieth century, McKinney settles comfortably on the obvious answer: a livery argument, two brothers with a history of fire, and motive stacked three ways over. Minnie Mae helps build that case herself—until a quiet man standing in a jail doorway says four words she can't shake loose. She isn't working alone, and she never has been. There's a knitting circle behind her: a boarding-house owner, a milliner, a mercantile wife, a doctor's daughter, and her own sister-in-law, women who gather in barns and reading rooms with their needles out and their ears open.
They don't have badges. They don't need them. What they have is a whole town that underestimates them completely—and a wrong answer none of them can let stand. Before there was the Only Women's League, there was just a knitting circle, a dead man in a water tank, and one farmwife who refused to look away. Warm, witty, and thick with frontier-era charm, Tanked is the first thread in a found-family series about six very different women discovering exactly what they're made of.
If you love the historical cozies of Verity Bright, Beth Byers, Magda Alexander, or Tonya Kappes, you'll feel right at home in McKinney.
Just launched — reader reviews are still coming in.
“Bessie Barr has a gift for handing you a character in a single line and having you root for them by the next. So a sixty-year-old farmwife armed with a basket of eggs and a lifetime of reading people, a body in a water tank on the very first morning of the twentieth century, and a knitting circle that runs on sharp needles and sharper ears? I already know these are folks I’m going to love spending time with. If you like your mysteries with real history, real heart, and a heroine the whole town underestimates, start here.”
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