Part of the process of creating a Good Neighbors Mystery is the development of the storyline in the chosen location. Often we develop several possible ideas, then winnow it down to the one we end up actually using. But during the development of our August release, which takes place in Madison, Wisconsin, we liked our final set of concepts so much that we decided to do something a bit different – instead of one full novel The Madison Three contains three novellas, all taking place at about the same time in the same place; Madison, Wisconsin.
Each of the novellas is stand-alone and they can be read out of order. But, because they take place in the same location, at around the same time, the novellas do overlap a bit. We enjoyed the unique challenges this represented, as we’ve not done this with any previous Good Neighbors Mystery, and we hope readers enjoy the outcome as much as we enjoyed creating them.
And in another first, The Madison Three features our first male protagonist. After 14 Good Neighbors Mysteries with a female lead character, The Madison Three includes our first leading man.
In What Came Back to the Prairie, ecologist Frankie Lindqvist finds a beloved colleague dead the morning after the autumn burn – the keeper of the Arboretum’s records, struck down with her life’s work stolen from her arms. The easy answer is a fall in the dark. But the missing papers point somewhere Frankie doesn’t want to look: toward the founding of the prairie itself, and one of its most revered names.
In The First-Ice Watch, the old man who spent his life recording Lake Mendota’s freezes is found dead by his pier, and the town is content to call it a bad heart on a cold night. Cora Vandehei knows better. She knows who killed him – and she cannot prove it, or even say it aloud, without unraveling a thirty-year-old secret that protecting the wrong person will cost a family everything.
In The Keepers of Foolishness, a rigid city attorney turns up dead on the frozen lake, and the obvious suspect is the cheerful oddball whose winter stunt drew him out onto the ice. Augie Toscano has four days, one increasingly nosy detective, and a very good reason to solve this himself before the whole city gathers on that same lake and the truth comes up with them.
Find The Madison Three at your favorite ebook provider – we hope you enjoy it.