Tanked (OWL Ladies Cozy Mystery)

A 1900s Historical Cozy Murder Mystery: A Warm & Witty Turn-of-the-Century Texas Cozy Mystery

New Year's Day, 1900. A new century. A dead man floating face-down in the McKinney, Texas, courthouse square water tank. And one farmwife who cannot — will not — let a wrong answer stand.

Minnie Mae Harper is sixty years old, armed with a basket of eggs and thirty-five years of reading people, and she is the most dangerous thing in Collin County. When Leroy McMurtry turns up dead on the first morning of the twentieth century, the whole town settles comfortably on the obvious a livery argument, two brothers with a history of fire, and motive stacked three ways. Minnie Mae helps build the case herself. Then a quiet man in a jail doorway says four words that won't leave her alone.

She isn't working alone. She never has been. There's a knitting circle — a boarding house owner, a milliner, a mercantile wife, a doctor's daughter, and her own sister-in-law — who gather in barns and reading rooms with their needles out and their ears open. They don't have badges. They don't need them. They have something a town that underestimates them completely.

Before there was the Only Women's League, there was just a knitting circle, a dead man in a water tank, and one farmwife who couldn't let a wrong answer stand

Tanked is the first book in the OWL Ladies Cozy Mystery Series — warm, witty, and set in the turn-of-the-century Texas town of McKinney, where six very different women are about to discover what they actually are.

The OWL Ladies Cozy Mystery Series is a clean, cozy historical mystery series filled with older (and younger) women sleuths, small-town Texas secrets, frontier-era charm, found-family friendship, amateur investigation, western wit, clever clues, lighthearted humor, cozy danger, and twisty whodunits.

If you like Verity Bright, Beth Byers, Magda Alexander and Tonya Kappes, you'll love this series. You can read each book as a stand-alone mystery. But TANKED will introduce you to many of the characters.