Welcome Wendy Tyson!
I’m thrilled to welcome Wendy Tyson, author of the Greenhouse Mysteries, to the Stiletto Gang.
Wendy’s latest book, Sowing Malice, releases tomorrow!
Also, don’t miss your chance to grab Bitter Harvest for a mere #99cents!
Wendy was kind enough to answer a few of my nosy questions!
In case readers haven’t yet fallen in love with Megan Sawyer, please tell us a bit about her.
Megan is a big-city environmental attorney-turned organic farmer. Following the tragic death of her soldier husband, Megan returns to her roots in scenic Winsome, Pennsylvania to take over the family farm and storefront and live with her spirited octogenarian grandmother, Bonnie “Bibi” Birch. In the beginning, the transition is hard. The farm is a mess, the storefront and cafe need to be completely remodeled, and the town zoning commissioner won’t cooperate. On top of that, Megan has to deal with ghosts from her past: memories of her late husband and a host of buried family secrets. Megan and Bibi persevere, and together they turn historical Washington Acres into a working farm and cafe—and solve a few murders along the way.
Megan is a gardener. Are you? What do you like to grow?
I am! (Well, little secret—my husband has the true green thumb, but I like to work in the garden and cook what we produce.) Before moving to Vermont, we had a micro-farm on our suburban Philadelphia property. There we could grow anything and everything, from tomatoes, herbs, garlic, and potatoes to raspberries, sour cherries, and blueberries. Last year we bought 11 acres in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and we turned a field into a large garden. The first season we mainly harvested rocks—lots and lots of rocks. This year, we planted a variety of vegetables: tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, snap peas, beets, kale, kohlrabi, Swiss chard, onions, corn, and many herbs. So far, so good…fingers crossed.
Megan moves back to a small town, Winsome, PA – what is it about small towns and cozy mysteries that makes such a good pairing?
There is something inherently comforting with small towns. When you’re part of a small town (as we are here in Vermont—population 400), you know many or most of your neighbors. While that sense of community and closeness you get from a small town is an appealing aspect of the cozy genre, I think there are practical reasons for the setting’s popularity as well. Most cozy mysteries star an amateur sleuth. As an amateur, it can be hard to get information. Police, private investigators, FBI agents, journalists…they all have the means to dig up dirt on suspects, and getting involved in or following a crime is often their job. The amateur, on the other hand, needs a reason to be involved and ways to get information. By setting a cozy in a small town, one in which the amateur sleuth is well connected, the author can more easily give their heroine/hero access to people and information. For example, the main character may be friends with the chief of police or be the sister of the town clerk. For me, setting the story in a small town like Winsome does double duty: it provides that sense of community (which ups the stakes when there’s a murderer about), and it means Megan’s crime-solving is believable in the context of where she lives.
Wendy Tyson is a member of Sisters in Crime, Penn Writers, and International Thriller Writers, and she’s a contributing editor and columnist for International Thriller Writers’ online magazines, The Big Thrill and The Thrill Begins. Wendy and her family live in Vermont.
Find Wendy on Facebook or at www.WATyson.com.
Thanks for having me on your blog today! I'm thrilled to be here.
Seems like you're as prolific a gardener as you are a writer, Wendy. Congratulations! Thanks for the post.
Welcome to the blog – and I hear you on harvesting rocks!