Karen MacInerney – författare

Margie Peterson is a typical stay-at-home mom until she trades dishes for detective work to become Austin’s least likely PI. Soon she’s knee-deep in cheating husbands, transvestites, and trouble in a laugh-out-loud new mystery from award-winning author Karen MacInerney.

With a husband who works long hours trying to make partner and two rambunctious kids that are running her ragged, Margie Peterson is like any other worn-out suburban mom. When she decides to take a job as a PI for a seedy local detective agency, everything changes. It doesn’t take long for Margie to get in over her head: her first day on the job she totals her minivan, mistakenly enters a drag contest, and winds up in the bathroom with a dead transvestite. But when Margie finds her home number in the victim’s phone, things really start to get interesting.

When Houston reporter Lucy Resnick cashes in her retirement to buy her grandmother’s farm in Buttercup, Texas, she’s looking forward to a simple life as a homesteader. But Lucy has barely finished putting up her first batch of Killer Dewberry Jam when an oil exploration truck rolls up to the farm and announces plans to replace her broccoli patch with an oil derrick. Two days later, Nettie Kocurek, the woman who ordered the drilling, turns up dead at the Founders’ Day Festival with a bratwurst skewer through her heart and one of Lucy’s jam jars beside her…and the sheriff fingers Lucy as the prime suspect.

Horrified, Lucy begins to talk to Nettie’s neighbors, but the more she gets to know the townspeople, the more she realizes she’s not the only one who had a beef with Nettie. Can she clear her name, or will her dream life turn into a nightmare?

Things aren’t going well for private investigator and mom Margie Peterson. Her husband, Blake, is claiming his taste for drag queens is “just a phase.” Her first-grade daughter isn’t fitting in at her new posh elementary school, Holy Oaks Catholic School. And her hippie mother has swept into town and replaced the family’s store of processed foods with seaweed snacks. To top it all off, a late-night phone call from her boss, Peaches Barlowe, has pulled Margie into a very strange murder case, one that involves the Holy Oaks headmaster, George Cavendish. Poor man—he just happened to die in a dominatrix’s pink vinyl wading pool while wearing nothing but Aquaman tights and goggles.

As it turns out, there are a lot of people who might have wanted Mr. Cavendish dead, from his bereaved, betrayed widow to the shady owners of the local strip joint. Not even Margie’s best friend, whose daughter didn’t get into Holy Oaks, is above suspicion. Can the overtaxed PI solve the case before things get even weirder?

Lucy Resnick’s nerves are as tight as a tea cozy. Her new goats, Hot Lips and Gidget, keep making a break for the town square, her truck is dying, and her boyfriend’s gorgeous ex-wife is in town for the holidays. Worse, someone’s digging holes on her land…and uprooting her peach orchard and dewberry patch in the process. Lucy needs additional holiday stress like she needs a blow to the head—which she receives one night, courtesy of the mystery digger.

When the dim-witted sheriff arrests one of Lucy’s best friends, the former reporter puts her own problems on the back burner and starts investigating. What she finds is a patchwork of clues—an injured puppy, a sapphire necklace gone missing, and a string of poison-pen letters—that draws her deep into a web of small-town secrets.

Word travels fast in Buttercup. When the killer learns Lucy’s on the trail, Lucy finds she needs more than her reporting skills to save her friend—she needs a Christmas miracle.

In the third novel in Karen MacInerney’s madcap series, murder proves a welcome distraction to the zany adventures and quirky characters in PI Margie Peterson’s life.

Private investigator/single mom Margie Peterson barely has time for breakfast, let alone to hit the gym. But when Austin Heights PTA president Pansy Parker hires her to find out who’s been embezzling PTA funds, that’s exactly where Margie ends up…finding Pansy dangling upside down from a Nautilus machine. But the PTA president’s not alone: the dead body of a personal trainer is there, too. And now she’s facing murder charges.

To find out what really happened, Margie goes undercover as a Brazilian body waxer and an energy drink bottler. What she discovers stinks worse than a pair of sweaty gym socks.

But that’s not all. Margie’s husband is living with his Madonna-impersonating boyfriend; her boss keeps setting her up on disastrous dates, including one with a vengeful sock puppet named Marshmallow; her daughter’s fry phone is being held hostage; and her pet piglet, Twinkles, ran off after a sausage-smuggling streaker.

Can Margie pull out the big guns to find the real killer, save the fry phone, and recover Twinkles—before it’s too late?