So, it’s not surprising I finally got around to having my newly downsized law librarian and self-proclaimed private investigator, Pat Pirard, get hired to work with an attorney on jury selection in what seems like an open-and -hut murder trial.

I always wanted to be seated on a jury, but during the selection process the question would always come up, “Are there any police officers in your family?” I was an only child, but I had cousins, two identical twins who were raised like my brothers who were both cops. Yes, I loved both of them, probably worshipped them because they were three years older than me, but I would try to explain that one became a police officer because he was a bit of a bully and probably enjoyed the power he had over others when he was in uniform and the other twin was knocked unconscious with his own billie club while trying to reason with a suspect during an arrest. He joined the police force to serve and protect (he was also deathly afraid of spiders.)

I figured knowing such different cops well made me especially qualified to be neutral and listen to the facts in a trial rather than being swayed by police testimony. Unfortunately, I never persuaded the judge and was always dismissed before I was sworn in to a jury.

My degree in behavioral science may have contributed to my fascination with juries, too. I was one of those people who had a professor who hired acting students to rush into the classroom unannounced and do outlandish things before rushing out again and then asking us to write down answers to questions about what we had just seen. In a classroom of thirty students, none of us agreed on everything we had witnessed. That experience taught me that firsthand witness accounts aren’t necessarily a recitation of facts, but can sometimes be influenced by a witnesses’ perception of what was happening.I relished the idea of studying the body language of witnesses during testimony and knew some of the tricks about watching where their eyes went as they recalled what happened to judge whether they were recalling an incident or making it up as they testified. I devoured articles about how to spot a lie. I wanted to use what I learned, but never had a chance.

One time when I was called for jury duty, but not called to the jury box, I returned to the courtroom and took notes about how the attorneys used their preemptory challenges to remove jurors. I was so fascinated by their logic—which struck me as being the reverse of what I thought it should have been—that I came back for the entire trial to see if it made any more sense to me.

What’s the cliché, “if you can’t do, teach?” I think writing about an experience you haven’t had works as well so I always wanted to incorporate jury selection in a mystery I wrote. In “What Lucy Heard,” I finally got my chance.

My protagonist, Pat Pirard, is modeled on a real person also named Pat. Both Pats were the Santa Cruz Law Librarian for many years, both carry a 357 Magnum gun and know how to use it, and both are unlicensed private investigators.  I rely on the real Pat for information about some of the tools she uses in her investigations, not to mention her myriad ideas based on cases she’s worked, but it took me until this year to finally ask her if she’d ever done any jury selection. The response I got was not the one I expected. She said, “Oh, yes, and never again.”

“Why, what happened?” I asked.

“It was a murder case. I wanted to meet the accused and decide if I believed his story before I agreed to work on jury selection. When I met him, I believed him, and went to work. I used every idea I had about jury selection—some of my ideas were unconventional—but they worked and he was acquitted. The only problem was that after the trial, I began to have doubts about his innocence. I didn’t sleep for four months worrying about what I had done until the real killer was caught and confessed. Never again. I can’t take that kind of stress.”

Oh, what fun! I was flooded with ideas about what to look for in a potential juror and Pat shared her secrets for her work about who to fight to seat and who to challenge. The real Pat’s experience took place before the incursion of social media into everyone’s life so I added some research using it. Of course I changed details about the murder, the accused, and the motive for murder, but starting “What Lucy Heard“ with jury selection and the impact Pat’s work had on the trial outcome was a joy for me to write.

Let’s have some fun today. Help me finish this story.

The holidays are fast approaching so I thought we should all take a deep breath and kick back with a cooperative mystery for us to solve before everything gets crazy-busy.

 The best story I ever heard took place in the ladies’ bathroom at Mission Ranch in Carmel, a gorgeous property on the Monterey Bay owned by Clint Earwood. The only thing that has kept me from turning it into a fun short story is that the ending remains a mystery.

There’s a small two-stall bathroom just outside the property restaurant which is as quaint and charming as the setting itself so I was happy to head for it when nature called. When I went inside, both stalls were occupied. The women in the stalls obviously knew one another and were engaged in a conversation. I had to wait for one of them to come out before I could attend to business.

I’m a writer which means I eavesdrop, but even if I weren’t, their conversation would have been enticing.

… “that’s when I realized the door had locked with me inside. I tried but I couldn’t open it. I pounded on the door and called for help, but then I looked at my watch and saw it was after five o’clock. I guessed the building was empty except for me in the bathroom. The worst part was that it was a Friday night and probably no one would find me until Monday morning.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Not really. I mean I was concerned, but I was in a bathroom so I had water and facilities. I even had half a sandwich in my purse that I saved from lunch and it didn’t have mayo on it so it would be safe to eat whenever I wanted.”

“That’s not much to eat for a weekend.”

“No, it isn’t, and I really didn’t want to spend the weekend locked in a bathroom.”

“Did you try using your phone to call for help?”

“You know how bad I am about keeping that thing charged. It was dead.”

“So, what did you do?”

At that moment I heard a flush. One of the stall doors opened and a tall woman came out and headed to the sink to wash her hands. She smiled at me and nodded her head ever so slightly to indicate I could now use her stall. I went inside and closed the door as their conversation continued.

“Well, I definitely didn’t panic. I noticed there was a small window on an outside wall. I could see it was outside because even though the glass was sort of frosted, I could still make out trees in the distance.”

“Uh huh.”

“I pushed it and the bottom pane slide up.”

“That was lucky.”

“It was. I yelled some more, but it seemed no one heard me. The window opening wasn’t very big and it was at about chest height…anyway, I’m petite and I figured I could just squeeze through it. The only problem was getting up high enough to do that.  I looked around and found a trash can. I upended it and pushed it under the window. Doing that made me up high enough that I could go out of the window, although I’d have to go head first which I didn’t like.”

“Head first?! Where would you land. You might hurt yourself.”

“I looked out. There was a high shrub, a camelia I think, not anything prickly, but a nice soft looking one so I thought I would make a soft landing. The only problem was I was wearing a lovely new outfit—a soft cream-colored cashmere sweater and matching wool pants—and knew I’d ruin my clothing squeezing out the window.”

“What did you do?”

I heard another flush, the second stall door squeak open, and the sink being used again.

“The only thing I could do. I tossed my purse out the window and took off my sweater and pants and tossed them out too, and then I climbed up on the trash can and…”

That’s when the women left the bathroom. What happened next remains a mystery to me. How would you finish the story? There’s a free copy of “What Lucy Heard” in print or for your e-reader for the person who comes up with the best ending. It seems like an appropriate title as a reward since the book is all about hearing something curious, too.

My books meet the criteria for cozy mysteries: body by the second chapter; an amateur sleuth (usually female) who has a police connection like a boyfriend, relative, or friend; gory details, language, and sex implied but takes place off page; tidy ending with justice served; and there’s even a recipe for mysterious chocolate chip cookies associated with one of the series.

The amateur sleuths, a realtor in Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries and a downsized law librarian turned self-styled private investigator in PIP Inc. Mysteries do solve the crime before the authorities do and sometimes in spite of the authorities. The stories end with the murderer coming to justice…at least most of the time. Interestingly one of my most popular characters escaped and readers are constantly asking if the character will turn up in a future book, hopeful that they will.

So my books are cozies by definition if sometimes slightly kinky like good British mysteries, my covers and book titles aren’t. No witty play-on-word titles for me. I prefer real estate related titles for the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries or harsh titles like “The Funeral Murder” or “The Corpse’s Secret Life” for the PIP Inc. Mysteries.

Pets are often another element of cozy mysteries and while my protagonists do have pets: cats for Regan McHenry and a dog and cat for Pat Pirard, they are never featured romping across a cover upending a cake or anything like that. Okay, Pat’s ginger cat Lord Peter Wimsey is on a back cover of “Dearly Beloved Departed” feigning innocence in the downing of a Christmas tree, but a reader has to have the book in hand to discover that.

I didn’t consider the idea of a typical cozy cover for the first book I wrote because when I started writing, a series wasn’t in my  mind. I had a good beginning and an ending that I liked and no idea how to connect them, let alone how to follow “The Death Contingency” with other books to make a series. Later I did modify the covers for the first series, but only to add a real estate sign and make them look like they belonged together. They still don’t look like traditional cozies.

I always considered myself a bit of a contrarian and I love British mysteries, besides, I like my edgier covers which work well with my non-cozy titles. Usually, I come up with what the title will be and a basic sketch of what the cover should look like before I start writing, so both title and cover design are an integral part of the story and make perfect sense to the reader by the time they discover who did it.

Nevertheless, I’ve always felt discomfited that I didn’t look like I belonged in the cozy genre and worried readers might skip over my books because they didn’t feel right. All that changed a few months ago when I heard someone say they enjoyed reading cozy-adjacent books. Cozy adjacent. Perfect. Now I have a home and I don’t have to apologize for my covers and titles. I’m free to use a non-cozy title like “What Lucy Heard” for my latest book.

You can see all the covers of my cozy-adjacent books, the other books I’ve written, the cookbook and anthologies I’ve edited, and read the first chapters of the mysteries at my website www.nancylynnjarvis.com or check them out in print and ebook format at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Lynn-Jarvis/e/B002CWX7IQ/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

That’s weird, I know. I can’t listen to music because it makes me want to dance or transports me to somewhere else, but I also don’t work well in silence. I used to, but after living in a construction zone for months as my house was being put back together after the CZU fire in 2020 and having compressors, hammers, and saws around me all day, I lost the ability to write when it’s quiet.

There is an unexpected consequence to writing to talk, though. I just released book six in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series, “What Lucy Heard,” and as I was reading through it again in an attempt to keep from embarrassing myself when  the editor saw it, I noticed it had subtle references to this year’s big new stories that I must have heard as I listened and typed. Evidently, they found their way into my subconscious even as I thought I was ignoring what I heard and that it was just writing white noise.

The cover of the book features a Cybertruck. When I was deciding what sort of vehicle the accused murderer should drive, something which matters for the story, I picked a Cybertruck not only because it’s quiet but also because that vehicle was so prominent in the news in the days of Elon Musk.

At one point in the story my protagonist, Pat Pirard, the former Santa Cruz County Law Librarian who has become an unlicensed private investigator to keep her and her dalmatian, Dot, and her ginger tabby, Lord Peter Wimsey—yes, a definite nod to the famed Dorthy Sayers detective—housed and fed after she was downsized out of her job, is coyly asking a suspect if it’s possible to make a text message disappear to see what they know. Her suspect says it’s easy if you use something like Signal to do it. I came up with that particular app after the news was all about a reporter accidently being included in a hi-level phone conversation he shouldn’t have heard and that a feature of the app was that conversations could be made to disappear.

The murder victim was a serial philanderer which gave me many suspects to play with since there were numerous people who had reason to want him dead. If that storyline is reminiscent of recent headlines, it’s probably not a coincidence. And the book ends with the protagonist asking her husband what will happen to the killer. He responds that rule of law must be followed or we have nothing, also a topic in the news today.

Editing is finished and the book was released on August 15^th so any new current events and news stories will have to wait until the next book to make it to my pages.

I’m preparing to read it aloud in serial form to a group called Well Connected starting on September 9^th. You have to sign up to join, but listening is free if you are over sixty.  I love doing live readings and have read all my books to that group. Here’s the link to sign up if you want to listen in to “What Lucy Heard.” https://frontporch.net/ connect/well-connected/ I hope you’ll join me.

I’m new here and decided it would be fun to introduce myself by telling you a tale about a writing coincidence I had some years ago that still gives me chills.

For the fourth book in my first series, Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, I needed help with a murder I had in mind. The premise for the Widow’s Walk League is that the husbands of women in a ladies’ walking group are being murdered one by one. I wanted to kill off one of the husbands at Woodies on the Wharf, an annual event in Santa Cruz where I live.

I had an idea about how he should meet his end, but I wasn’t sure if it was feasible so I contacted the president of the local woodies club to ask for advice. I presented my idea for how the victim should die and, once he was convinced that I was writing fiction and not a murderer plotting a real killing, he was eager to help.

 We met for coffee. I came armed with questions; he brought diagrams, photos, and a wrench. He not only explained how easy it would be to use a wrench on the undercarriage of the car to reverse the transmission, he had a photo of the make, model, and year of the woodie to use and told me where it should be parked on the wharf so my victim would plunge into the bay and sink to the bottom so quickly, he wouldn’t be able to escape the vehicle.

Now for the shivery part. A recuring character in the series is a police officer named Dave. He’s my protagonist’s buddy—you have to have some law enforcement connection in a cozy mystery—who has talked himself into a job as the police department ombudsman after losing an eye in a shootout. He’s based on a real friend also named Dave who lost his eye in a shootout while on duty. Remember that for a minute.

The book came out a week before Woodies on the Wharf so I decided to take a copy to the helpful woodies club president. I also decided it would be fun to see who was parked in the deadly parking space and tell him to be careful because things hadn’t worked out well for the last man who parked there.

As we introduced ourselves, I noted that he had the same first name as my murder victim. When I jested about being careful, he said nothing scared him because he was a retired homicide detective and had seen it all.

“Where did you work?” I asked.

“San Jose,” he replied.

“One of the characters in my book is based on a real police officer who worked for SJPD until he lost an eye in a shootout,” I said.

He snorted, “You must mean Dave. I was with him the night that happened. I told him you never  pop your head up to look over a fence when pursuing an armed suspect, but he didn’t listen to me.”

Writing is so much fun, and when things like this happen, it’s even more entertaining.