Humpty Bumpkin Country Cousin Mysteries Book 1

In a small country town, justice might be swift…but rumor is swifter! Deer Hollow is a small community built in a verdant, rolling countryside. Big city ways are rejected at the Hollow. Things like murder, which can turn a sunny Sunday in June right over onto its bucolic head.

She’s just a girl with a dog, a cat, and a pig. And since she’s been drafted into helping her boyfriend scare his younger brother straight, she’s a girl who’s suddenly glad she’s an only child. Hal’s younger brother has been banished to Deer Hollow because of his proclivity for getting into trouble. Hal’s parents are hoping he’ll take the kid under his wing and straighten him out. But Asher Amity has a knack for finding trouble, and it doesn’t take him long to find it in Deer Hollow. When Asher steps into a steaming pile of murder and treachery, Hal and Joey are destined to get dragged into the mess with him. Who knew how dangerous babysitting could be?

She's just a country girl who loves her dog…and her cat…and her pig. But protecting them from a killer might suck the sweet right out of her bucolic little world. Lance Lucklin has always had the luck of the Irish, though he’s about as far from Irish as you can get. It is, after all, how he got his nickname, Lucky Lucklin. But it appears that his luck has run out in a big way. That’s putting it mildly, I guess. Since Lucky just turned up dead, hanging from a tool hook at my family’s auction business. Was Lucky’s death meant as a warning for me? Could this mean the return of an old villain? Will Hal and I be called on to help the local Deer Hollow police find a killer? In the end, luck probably won’t have much to do with the outcome. Luck can be made. And as death stalks the people I love, I’m fully prepared to force the hand of fate and create my own luck. Or die trying.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Bumpkin, died a very shiny death… Rudy-Bob Hortmann has never quite gotten the hang of making friends. He doesn’t much like peopling, mostly preferring the company of his pot-bellied pig, Ethel Squeaks to humanoid types. But there’s one exception. Rudy-Bob loves kids. So for Christmas every year he gives himself a present. He plays Santa at the annual Deer Hollow Christmas party. Only this year, Rudy-Bob doesn’t make it out of the Santa suit when the Pageant is done. Instead, Deputy Sheriff Arno Willager finds Rudy-Bob literally chillin’ in a snowbank, his bulbous nose flashing red through the snow. That’s where I come into the picture. I’m Joey Fulle, and I’m pretty good at finding bodies around my place on the outskirts of Deer Hollow. I didn’t actually find this one, of course. But I’m fully invested in locating his killer. ’Cause, with the help of my handsome PI boyfriend Hal, my sweet and goofy Pitbull Caphy, and my opinionated Siamese cat, LaLee, I’m also pretty good at finding killers. Sometimes, even before they find me…

Things like murder have a funny way of messin' up a country girl's life, turning a pretty pastoral day right onto its bucolic head. Joey's just a country girl who loves her dog, her cat, and her pig. But her life is about to get less countrified and more...erm...homicide.

She's just a country girl who loves her dog. But her life is about to get less countrified and more...erm...homicide. Deer Hollow is a small community built in a verdant, rolling countryside. The nearest big city is over an hour away and big city ways are rejected at the Hollow. Unfortunately, the big city isn

I wasn’t looking forward to going with my PI boyfriend to the rustic cabin in the woods of a crotchety local recluse who believed someone wanted him dead. I definitely wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Deb Taylor isn’t what you’d call a normal kind of guy. Maybe it’s the fact that he bears an eerie resemblance to the elusive mythological sasquatch. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s a six-and-a-half-foot-tall, hairy and muscular guy named Deb. It’s possible our new client had a premonition that someone was going to fatally pierce him with the sharp end of a shovel. It’s also very likely he’s lying. But when he hires Hal to find a stalker who seems to wish him ill, it’s his grumpiness that makes me think he might have a point. Anybody as crotchety as Deb Taylor couldn’t help but make enemies. Lots of them. However, given his size and strength, I thought it was unlikely he’d be an easy guy to damage. I’ll admit to being wrong on this one. Really. Really wrong.

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Best Book of Fall (Esquire) and a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Lit Hub) What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.