Search results for ""author jeanne cooney""

Move over Stephanie Plum, Betty Crocker, and the residents of Lake Wobegon. Retired farmer Doris Day Anderson Connor and her quirky friends and relatives are solving crime in the Scandinavian-Lutheran farming community of Hallock, in the northwest corner of Minnesota. This book, the second installment in the It's Murder series, has Doris and her sister, Grace Kelly Anderson, the owner of the local café, taking ninety-year-old Rose O'Brien ice fishing. The day ends, however, with nothing to show for their efforts except a dead body. With Rose distressed over the crime, Doris feels compelled to make inquiries in an effort to move the murder investigation along, much to the chagrin of the sheriff, an old boyfriend and a current puzzle. While in the café, at a funeral, and during a gender-reveal-party blizzard, she uncovers answers, but she also learns secrets and lies that lead her to wonder if she truly knows the residents of her hometown. After all, at least one of them is a killer.

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Reporter Emerald Malloy returns to Minnesota's Red River Valley to gather more recipes for an encore feature the Minneapolis newspaper plans to run on rural cooking. This time around, Margie Johnson, the owner of Hot Dish Heaven, the local cafe, surprises her with unusual recipes, including Sauerkraut Hot Dish, explaining that man cannot live on Tuna Noodle Hot Dish alone. While intrigued by Margie's efforts to expand her "culinary horizons," Emerald has no interest in looking into the murder of a farmhand whose body is found at a local sugar beet piler. Instead, her plans focus on getting more "intimately" acquainted with Randy Ryden, the deputy she met when last in town. Those plans change, however, when someone close to Margie is arrested for the crime, and Emerald and friends must investigate their way through a blizzard, a fish fry, and a whole lot more to discover the real killer.

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After a hard life on a farm in northwestern Minnesota’s Red River Valley, Doris Connor buries her philanderer husband and moves her century-old Sears and Roebuck farmhouse into the small Scandinavian community of Hallock, located on the edge of nowhere. She longs for a retirement heavy on solitude and serenity, but her plans are put on hold when her flamboyant sister and a ninety-year-old friend of the family move in. To further complicate matters, the local pharmacy is robbed, the suspect is murdered, and the sheriff believes Doris’s two adult children of being complicit in the crimes. Doris realizes that a placid existence is possible only if she first proves her children’s innocence. But can she find the killer among the folks in Hallock? And if she does, will the sheriff, an old flame but a new headache, believe her?

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Cub reporter Emerald Malloy is assigned to gather "church food" recipes from the owner of Hot Dish Heaven, a café in a small town in the Red River Valley. Upon her arrival, she learns of a local, unsolved murder. Confident that solving the case will catapult her from newspaper "gopher" to investigative reporter, she questions the locals while attending a benefit dinner-dance at the VFW. By the end of the night, she's consumed lots of hotdish and bars while talking to everyone from the Irish, Catholic priest who lives among these Scandinavian, Lutheran farmers to the café owner's eccentric aunts. She's also met a hunky deputy sheriff and learned some tough lessons about herself. But the question remains, "Will she live long enough for any of it to matter?"

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