Showing results by author "Karen Musser Nortman" in All Categories

A cozy/thriller mystery! The starry skies over New Mexico, the "Land of Enchantment", may hold secrets of their own. The Shoemakers and the Ferraros, on an extended camping trip, find themselves picking up a souvenir they don't want and taking sidetrips they didn't plan on.

During the pandemic, camping was supposed to be a fairly safe activity. That's only if you don't camp with Frannie Shoemaker. Frannie and her husband Larry commit in the fall of 2019 to take on a campground hosting job in the spring of 2020. In that time, the world turned upside down, and their job came with a whole new set of challenges. But of course, where Frannie's involved, other trouble can't be far behind.

Frannie Shoemaker and her friends go camping to get away from the real world. So, they are surprised and dismayed to find their wilderness campground the production site of a new "reality" show - Celebrity Campout. Reality intrudes on their week in the form of accidents, nature, and even murder. They handle the situation with their usual humor, compassion, and mystery solving, because...camping can be murder.

Geocaching isn't supposed to be about finding dead bodies. But when retiree Frannie Shoemaker goes camping, standard definitions don't apply. A weekend in a beautiful state park in Iowa buzzes with fund-raising events, a search for ninja turtles, a bevy of suspects, and lots of great food. But are the campers in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often?

A trip down memory lane is fine if you don't stumble on a body. Frannie Shoemaker and her friends camp at Old Dam Trail State Park near one of Donna Nowak's childhood homes. They take in the county....

A holiday novella. The Shoemakers and Ferraros plan to spend Christmas in Texas with Larry and Jane Ann's brother and then take a camping trip through the Southwest. But those plans are stopped cold when they hit a rogue ice storm in Missouri and they end up snowbound in a campground. And that's just the beginning.

A biking and camping trip to southeastern Minnesota turns into double trouble for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends as she deals with a canoeing mishap and a couple of bodies. Strange happenings in the campground, the nearby nature learning center, and an old power plant complicate the suspect pool and Frannie tries to stay out of it - really - but what can she do? After all, she is only curious, but sometimes it isn't just cats who have trouble with that!

Frannie and Larry Shoemaker love taking their grandchildren, Sabet and Joe, camping with them. But at Bluffs State Park, Frannie finds herself worrying more than usual about their safety, and when another young girl disappears from the campground in broad daylight, her fears increase. The fun of a bike ride, a flea market, marshmallow guns, and a storyteller are quickly overshadowed. Accusations against Larry and her add to the cloud over their heads. Frannie begins to puzzle out the mystery.

Sometimes tiptoeing through the tulips can lead to murder! Max and Lil, seventy-something sisters, visit their cousin Bess in the middle of the Tulip Fest. But things don't turn out so rosy for a couple of Bess' acquaintances who end up pushing up daisies.

Maxine Berra and Lillian Garrett, sisters in their 70s, travel together to visit friends and relatives in Max's 1950 red Studebaker with her Irish Setter, Rosie. Does that mean they are amicable companions? Not at all. But when, during a family reunion, the murder of a family friend throws suspicion on their shiftless younger brother, they put their heads together to try to save him.

How many of us have wished at some time or other we could go back in time and change an action or a decision or just take back something that was said? But it is what it is. There is no rewind, reboot, delete key or any other trick to change the past, right? Lynne McBriar can. She bought a 1937 camper that turned out to be a time portal. And when she meets a young woman who suffers from serious depression over the loss of a close friend 10 years earlier, she has the power to do something about it.

Frannie and Larry Shoemaker are retirees who enjoy weekend camping with their friends in state parks in this new cozy mystery series. They anticipate the usual hiking, campfires, good food, and interesting side trips among the bluffs of beautiful Bat Cave State Park for the long Fourth of July weekend - until a dead body turns up. Confined in the campground and surrounded by strangers, Frannie is drawn into the investigation.

A 1937 vintage camper trailer half hidden in weeds catches Lynne McBriar's eye when she is visiting an elderly friend, Ben. Ben eagerly sells it to her and she just as eagerly embarks on a restoration. But after each remodel, sleeping in the trailer lands Lynne and her daughter Dinah in a previous decade - exciting, yet frightening. Glimpses of their home town and ancestors 50 or 60 years earlier is exciting and also offers some clues to the mystery of Ben's lost love.

Seventy-something sisters, Max and Lil, visit western Pennsylvania, partly to see Lil's son Terry and his family, and partly to enjoy to colorful fall foliage. The sisters volunteer to help staff a fundraiser haunted house. The house has amazing special effects and a haunted garden. It is hugely popular and should bring in a lot of money for the new school auditorium. What could go wrong?

Lynne McBriar swore her vintage trailer would stay in a museum where it would be safe from further time travel. But when a museum in Texas wants to borrow it, she determines that she must deliver it herself. Her husband Kurt convinces her to take it along Route 66 for research he is doing. What starts out as a family vacation soon turns deadly.