A Free Southern Cozy Mystery for Your Summer Reading Pile

“They should’ve kept the mudpit.”

That’s the first line of STILL LIFE IN BRUNSWICK STEW, and it’s also pretty close to my actual opinion on small-town summer festivals. I have been to more county fairs, cook-offs, and “arts and crafts days” than I can count, and I can tell you from experience: any event that swaps out mud-wrestling for macrame pot holders is just asking for a fistfight.

That’s more or less how Cherry Tucker feels about the Annual Sidewinder Brunswick Stew Cook-Off, too. She’s not there for the stew, or the pulled pork, or the four-by-fours churning up a cotton field. She’s there because her best friend Eloise begged her to set up an art booth, and because Cherry is down to thirty-five cents and a few gum wrappers and cannot afford to turn down a captive audience. What she gets instead is a front-row seat to a hundred-year-old argument about who really invented Brunswick Stew (it was Georgia, for the record, not Virginia), a friend who eats way too much of it, and, by the end of the day, a death nobody but Cherry thinks is suspicious.

I love writing these small-town festival scenes because they are, embarrassingly, mostly true to life. Swap the mudpit for a pie contest and the cook-off rivalry for a casserole committee, and you’ve basically described every county fair I’ve ever attended in Georgia. Somebody always thinks somebody else stole their recipe. Somebody’s cousin always ends up in a shouting match near the funnel cake stand. Nobody ever, ever backs down about whose family makes the “real” version of anything. I didn’t have to invent much for this book. I just had to write down what I’d already witnessed with a sweet tea in my hand.

STILL LIFE IN BRUNSWICK STEW is Book 2 in my Southern cozy mystery series starring Cherry Tucker, and it’s the one where a sultry Georgia summer weekend goes from “broke artist hawking paintings” to “murder investigation nobody invited her to run.” When Eloise collapses after one bowl too many of the cook-off’s prize stew, the police write it off as food poisoning. Cherry doesn’t buy it, and she’s not about to let the county’s sorriest excuse for an inquiry close the book on her friend. Digging through a cook-off’s worth of secret family recipes, ringers, and grudges older than the stew pot itself puts her crosswise with her deputy boyfriend (he has strong opinions about civilians playing detective — he’s against it) and on a collision course with a killer who’d sooner run her out of town than let the truth come to a boil.

It’s country-fried sleuthing with a side of romance, and it’s exactly the kind of funny Southern cozy mystery I want on my own porch in July: a little dangerous, and set somewhere hot enough that you’re grateful for the glass of tea sweating in your hand.

Here’s the fun part: STILL LIFE IN BRUNSWICK STEW is free on Kindle July 21 through 23. I timed it to summer on purpose — the whole book takes place during a sweaty, chaotic small-town festival, so there’s something fitting about handing it out for free in the thick of actual summer, when you’re most likely to be sitting somewhere hot yourself, fanning yourself with a paper plate, wondering if the potato salad has been out too long.

If you’ve read Portrait of a Dead Guy and have been meaning to catch up with Cherry, or if you’ve never met her at all, this is a good excuse.

Grab your free copy here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7HBSN8

And since I know you have one: tell me about the summer cook-off, potluck, or family reunion that went sideways on you. I need the story. Bonus points if a goat, a stolen recipe, or a genuine feud was involved. I’ll be reading every one of them, probably while eating stew I didn’t make myself and shouldn’t entirely trust.