While I do intend someday soon to return to sharing my neighbor interviews with you,

I hope you don't mind that I'm going to continue to ship gears for the time being.

I adore cozy mysteries.

I find them to be the perfect escape, and I've decided to try my hand at one.

Puzzles aren't my strong suit, though, so writing a mystery really intimidates me, but I'm going to give it my best shot and hope I don't end up giving away the killer on page two.

And just like with Thea's story, I don't exactly know what's going to happen here.

I know our main character, Sloan Putnam, is in a moment of transition,

which leaves her vulnerable to being sucked into the cutthroat world of her children's elementary

school parent-teacher association. And I know who dies and who killed them, but other than that,

I've got these first few pages and a shaky amount of trust that Sloan will fill me in on the rest.

And as luck would have it, Sloan lives in Woodland Hills, that same town where we encountered a demonically infested

cul-de-sac. Now, the whole town isn't demonic, but it is a strange place where strange things happen.

A place where a regular old mom could continuously trip over dead bodies and be put in the position to figure out how those bodies ended up dead.

So let's suspend disbelief, head west on the mass pike out of Boston to that weird little suburb, and see what their elementary school PTA is up to.

Oh, and p.S. I'm going to do my best with the sound quality.

But the dogs never leave my side.

And if I tried to force them out of the office, they'd stand outside the door and bark.

I try to cut out as much background as I can, but the 15-year-old Ivy basically just either asked for food or snores at this point. So we're going to do our best. Okay, we're off to the burbs.

Fatal Fall Fest, a PTA mystery by Liz Sauer. Epigraph. You pay the grocer, you fix the

toaster, you kiss the host goodbye, then you break a window, burn the souffle, scream a lullaby.

Coming around again, Carly Simon.

Paul, my little ceramic penguin in the study, always faces due south.

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