Kris Bock on Planning a Successful Amateur Sleuth Mystery
By Kris Bock
When planning a mystery series, it’s helpful to have a main character and a setting that both lend themselves to future mysteries. That’s easy enough if your main character is in law enforcement, like a police officer, FBI agent, or sheriff. Amateur sleuth mysteries sometimes get past the problem by ignoring it. Would an average woman who owns a bakery or shop in a charming small town keep stumbling on dead bodies? One would certainly hope not! Still, it’s fun (in stories if not in real life), so readers go with it.
I wanted to write a series of amateur detective mysteries where the main character has a good reason to get involved in murder investigations. In The Accidental Detective humorous mystery series, I made Kate a war correspondent. She’s used to danger, and she knows how to investigate. It makes sense that people might ask her for help with problems when they don’t want to involve the police or when the police aren’t interested yet.
I set the series in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area because it provides so many opportunities for crime. The large senior population attracts scammers. Family members impatient for an inheritance might kill. The border with Mexico could mean drugs and human trafficking crossing over. I created a fictional city within the greater Phoenix metropolitan area so I can use this fictional city government for political issues, and make the mayor an old friend of Kate’s.
In book 7, Something Prowling in Paradise Park, Kate is asked to help figure out how to get rid of squatters who moved into a couple’s home while they were away for the summer. She also investigates the thefts of purebred dogs, and smash and grab burglaries at marijuana dispensaries. Weaving together these three mysteries keeps her busy and hopefully keeps readers entertained!
Small Town Charm (and Crime)
I’ve spent plenty of time in Arizona, where my mother lives, but I live in a small town in New Mexico. For my second mystery series, the Reluctantly Psychic Mysteries, I chose a small town setting, loosely based on Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and the Billy The Kid Museum there. My main character, Petra, is a highly introverted thirty-year-old woman who starts work at the odd, sprawling museum.
Basically, the main character and setting are the opposite of Kate in Phoenix. But doesn’t that make it hard to drop Petra into mystery investigations?
It could, but I gave her a couple of characteristics that lead her into trouble. First, she has psychometry: when she touches objects, she picks up emotions left behind by people who held them previously. That sometimes draws her attention to crimes and gives her insight law enforcement doesn’t have. Second, she has a deeply ethical core. Even if she would much rather not get involved, she is driven to see justice served and to help the people who become her found family in her new town.
The more Petra gets involved in her community, the more issues will be drawn to her attention. The more she helps people, the more they’ll recognize her psychic gift and analytical skills, and the more they’ll ask for help. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that will ultimately change her for the better.
Sleuthing Sidekicks
Both Kate and Petra have wonderful gangs of supportive sidekicks. Kate has her sister as a co-detective, a couple of brilliant computer geeks, and her father and his friends, the Coffee Shop Irregulars. Petra starts out with no close connections except for her many pets. She is almost forced into being more sociable by her aggressively friendly coworkers and their book club, which morphs into a crime-fighting club as needed. Quirky secondary characters are a great source of humor in mysteries, and I love a good “found family.”
While Kate and Petra are very different characters, in different situations, I feel like they could be friends. Maybe someday their paths will cross. In the meantime, it’s been fun exploring how each of them might get involved in solving mysteries in their different communities.
Something Prowling in Paradise Park (The Accidental Detective Book 7) by Kris Bock is out March 2: Filled with twists, humor, and heart, Something Prowling in Paradise Park delivers the perfect blend of cozy mystery, female sleuth suspense, and found-family crime solving. Fans of J.A. Jance, Elly Griffiths, and Ann Cleeves will love this page-turner set against Arizona’s sunbaked secrets.
—
Kris Bock writes mystery, suspense, and romance, often with smart, snarky heroines finding adventure (sometimes against their will) in the Southwest. The Accidental Detective humorous mystery series and the Reluctantly Psychic Mystery series are perfect for fans of suspenseful whodunit murder mysteries with high stakes and humor. The Furrever Friends Sweet Romance series stars the employees and customers at a cat café. Watch as they fall in love with each other and shelter cats. In the Accidental Billionaire Cowboys series, a Texas ranching family wins a fortune in the lottery and discover winning the lottery causes as many problems as it solves. Readers call Kris’s romantic suspense novels “Smart romance with an Indiana Jones feel.”
Sign up for the Kris Bock newsletter and get an Accidental Detective short story and other freebies. Then every two weeks, you’ll get fun content about pets, announcements of new books, sales, and more.
Find Kris:
Amazon US page or Amazon UK page
Category: On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
