Tater the Goat: Inside My Funny Cozy Mystery Series for National Goat Week

It's National Goat Week, which in most households means absolutely nothing, but around here it means it's finally time to give credit where it's due: to Tater, the menace of Grandpa Ed's farm, and arguably the most consistent antagonist in the entire Cherry Tucker Mystery series — a Southern, funny cozy mystery series that, I promise, also features actual murders.

Here's how Cherry describes pulling up to that farm in Portrait of a Dead Guy, Book 1:

Pulling into the farm could be trickier than holding onto the bottom lane at Bristol Motor Speedway. With the right signal blinking, the Datsun idled before the gravel turn. I scanned the rutted drive and weedy foreground with its smattering of chewed forsythia. Searched the split in the lane leading to a rusty-roofed barn.

Empty.

The other fork led to a little ranch house with a tacked-on screened porch and crumbling flower beds. The house hid behind a thick ancient oak and an overgrown Bradford Pear flush with white blossoms.

I craned my neck, but couldn't see past the limbs of the oak still clinging to last season's dead leaves. I revved my engine, but that trick never worked.

Whistling wouldn't work either.

Reasonable readers might assume Cherry is scanning for a person. A killer, maybe. This is a murder mystery series, after all.

Nope. Cherry is looking for a goat.

Specifically, she's looking for Tater — Grandpa Ed's enormous white billy goat, who treats the farm lane as his personal jousting arena and Cherry's yellow Datsun truck as the opposing knight. 

By the time we catch up with him in Chapter 8, Tater is “galloping toward me, his stiff tail wagging at the yellow truck's entrance,” which sounds friendly until you remember what billy goats do with their heads.

He loves to play chicken with her truck. When she stops to keep from running him over, there's always damage to the truck. Hoof prints. Chewing of clothing. Destruction of casseroles.

Cherry's reaction, as always, is a single weary “Dangit.”

By the time we get to A Composition in Murder, Tater has had the audacity to reproduce. His offspring with Pearl's prize Saanen goat, Snickerdoodle, are referred to as “Snickeraters and Taterdoodles,” "Itty bitties born of forbidden love." Forbidden specifically because Pearl considers her Saanen too refined for the likes of Tater. 

Tater, for his part, remains undeterred. Tater has never once in his life been deterred.

The farmyard situation has, by this point, escalated into something closer to a home invasion with extra steps:

“Like a swarm, they attacked in tandem. Like a pestilence, they descended from all sides.”

That's not a zombie movie. That's Tuesday at Grandpa Ed's.

And yet — and this is the part I love about writing Tater — Cherry never actually wants him gone. In Hijack in Abstract, when she thinks Grandpa Ed might have sold the herd, she feels “a small pang of sadness.” When she finds Tater behind a fence instead, stuck and sulking, she negotiates with him like he's a difficult relative at Thanksgiving: 

“It's time to set things to rights... I'm letting you free, Tater. But next time I drive up the lane and you get in my way, I will not hesitate to ram your thick, dirty hide.”

She lets him out. She'd never ram him, despite her sassy comment. Obviously. He is, after all, family — or as close to family as a 150-pound goat with a grudge can be.

If you've made it this far and you still haven't met Cherry Tucker — the dead broke, sassy Southern portrait artist who keeps getting roped into solving murders nobody asked her to solve — National Goat Week seems like as good an excuse as any. Start with Portrait of a Dead Guy, Book 1. The series is free to read with Kindle Unlimited, and it comes with Tater, Grandpa Ed, a yellow Datsun truck with a battered grill, some bodies, and a lot of laughs.

Love Funny Cozy Mystery Series? Try A Cherry Tucker Mystery

Grab PORTRAIT OF A DEAD GUY here on Kindle, on paper, or in audiobook: https://books2read.com/portrait

Download the series here for FREE with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B46NWQYH