“So how did George end up with Alfie’s poisoned pie?” Del asked first, which just made me look smarter than him.
Robert turned to EZ. “Sheriff, want to solve this case?”
“Why Dr. van der Grimmen, I thought you’d never ask.” She grinned. “Minnie opened all the boxes by mistake, including the shoofly pies for Alfie and George. Martha put the pies back in the boxes for her boyfriends but the pies went into the wrong boxes. George, busy getting his ass handed to him by Alfie, never saw the boxes had been opened.”
Robert pulled off the rubber gloves and tucked them back in his pocket. “George Stubbs poisoned himself by mistake.”
Del was told to lock up the house and get back to his family. EZ said she’d call and cancel the crime scene techs. She headed to the office to start the paperwork. Robert and I walked back home. If we went back to the civic center, we’d be given the third degree about George’s death. And no extra helping of Sue Ingersoll’s bourbon yams was worth that sort of ordeal. And I still had a frozen turkey dinner in the back freezer, my original plan for the holiday. Robert seemed pensive—more so than usual. Against my better judgment, I asked what was wrong.
“Nothing is wrong. I’m thinking about Martha Stoltz. She randomly picked up two of the four shoofly pies to rebox. She could have just as easily left the poisoned one on the table and accidentally killed eight innocent people.”
I laughed out loud.
Robert looked at me with a puzzled look. Now he knew how I felt most of the time.
I smiled. “You just agreed with the entire town—Martha Stoltz’s pies are to die for. George Stubbs just took it too literally.”
The Guests at Our Table This Year
(in order of their appearance)
Barbara Metzger
Barbara is a New York Times bestselling author. Her novels, mostly set in Regency-era England, have won numerous awards, including the Romance Writers of America RITA, the National Reader’s Choice Award, and the Madcap award for humor in romance writing. In addition, Barbara has won two Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times Magazine. She has over 20 titles published by Untreed Reads in ebook format, with several also in print and audiobook formats. Her story “Mama Made Kugel” appears in The Killer Wore Cranberry: Room for Thirds, and her story “Bogged Down,” appears in The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fourth Meal of Mayhem.
Arthur Carey
Arthur Carey is a former newspaper reporter, editor, and college instructor who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. He is a member of the California Writers Club. He enjoys writing across genres, including science fiction, fantasy, detective, mystery, and humor. His fiction has appeared in print and Internet publications, including Pedestal, Funny Times, Suspense, and Clever Magazine. His two self-published novels, The Gender War and Bummer Summer, are available at Amazon, together with a novella and short stories. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and of the University of California, Los Angeles. After working as a reporter and copy editor on daily newspapers in Michigan and California, he taught journalism at San Jose City College. He enjoys nature walks and bird watching.
Earl Staggs
Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels Memory of a Murder and Justified Action, and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. He invites any comments via email at [email protected]. He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.
Lisa Wagner
Lisa is a home educator who lives with her family in Georgia. Inspired by veganism and her son who has nut allergies, Lisa set out on a mission to create recipes for her family that are not only nutritious and healthy, but flavorful and allergen-free. Today, nearly everything she makes is from scratch. Untreed Reads published Lisa’s Valentine’s Day–infused vegan cookbook From Lisa with Love in January of 2013. Three more of her delicious recipes are included in The Killer Wore Cranberry: Room for Thirds, and another three in The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fourth Meal of Mayhem.
KM Rockwood
KM Rockwood draws on a varied background for stories, including working as a laborer in steel fabrication and in a fiberglass plant, and supervising an inmate work crew in a large state prison. These positions, as well as work as a special-education teacher at an alternative high school and a GED instructor in correctional facilities, provide material for numerous short stories and novels, including the Jesse Damon Crime Novel series. The Rockwood household includes six cats and two dogs.
Herschel Cozine
Herschel Cozine has published extensively in the children’s field. His stories and poems have appeared in many of the national children’s magazines. Work by Herschel has also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines, Wolfmont Press Toys for Tots Anthologies, Dark House Books Anthologies and Woman’s World. Additionally, he has had many stories appear in Orchard Press Mysteries, Mouth Full of Bullets, Flash Bang Mystery Magazine, and others. He was the winner of the 2017 Derringer Award flash category.
Kelley Lortz
Kelley Lortz writes stories of various lengths. She and her husband share their home in Mid-Missouri with two exceptional boys and a mildly passive-aggressive dog. She works as a financial analyst, loves unreliable narrators and always gets hiccups after eating baby carrots. She has written under the name Darby Krenshaw. Kelley did extensive and rigorous pie research for this short story, with the help of her family. This is her third short story published with Untreed Reads.
Bobbi A. Chukran
Bobbi A. Chukran has been a published author in fiction and nonfiction, an artist and playwright over the past 35 years. Currently, she’s focused on writing short fiction inspired by the people and things she sees every single day. Some of this stuff, you just can’t make up. Her “Nameless, Texas” series of short stories have been published in several anthologies and as single ebooks. A population of quirky characters meander in and out of the stories, and the protagonist is often different in each one. Bobbi currently lives near Austin, Texas, in a tiny town much like Nameless. She shares her renovated 1930s farmhouse with her husband, Rudy, a lot of spoiled felines and several imaginary grandchildren. For more information, visit her blog at http://bobbichukran.blogspot.com.
Lesley A. Diehl
Lesley is a country gal through and through, from her childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois to college in a cornfield in Iowa. Lesley creates sassy, snoopy protagonists who embrace chasing killers in country settings. Lesley writes several series: the Big Lake Murder mysteries and the Eve Appel mysteries, both set in rural Florida; the Laura Murphy mysteries located on a lake in upstate New York; and short stories featuring a few of Lesley’s unique relatives from back on the farm (Aunt Nozzie and the Grandmothers). She is inspired by an odd set of literary muses: a ghost named Fred and a coyote as yet unnamed. To read more about Lesley’s unusual and humorous cozy mysteries, go to www.lesleyadiehl.com.
Albert Tucher
Albert Tucher is the creator of prostitute Diana Andrews, who has appeared in more than seventy hardboiled short stories in venues including The Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Her first longer case, the novella, The Same Mistake Twice, is an Untreed Reads release. The characters in “The Mac Salad Killer” are also part of Diana’s world. Albert Tucher is a librarian at the Newark Public Library, where he is legendary for his coffee consumption.
Maryann Miller
Maryann Miller is an award-winning author of numerous books, screenplays and stage plays. She started her professional career as a journalist, writing columns, feature stories and short fiction for regional and national publications. Now she writes primarily mysteries, including the critically acclaimed Seasons Mystery Series that features two women homicide detectives in Dallas. Think Lethal Weapon se
t in Dallas with female leads. The first two books in the series, Open Season and Stalking Season, have received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal. Her mystery, Doubletake, was honored as the Best Mystery for 2015 by the Texas Association of Authors. Miller lives in the beautiful Piney Woods of East Texas on a little plot of land affectionately called Grandma’s Ranch.
Liz Milliron
Liz Milliron has been making up stories, and creating her own endings for other people’s stories, for as long as she can remember. She’s worked for almost twenty years in the corporate world, but finds creating fiction is far more satisfying than writing software manuals. A lifelong mystery fan, her short fiction has been published at Uppagus.com and Mysterical-e. She has also had stories included in Lucky Charms: 12 Crime Tales, Blood on the Bayou (the 2016 Bouchercon anthology), Fish Out of Water, and Malice 12: Mystery Most Historical. She is a past president of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime. Visit her at http://lizmilliron.com, find her on Facebook at https://facebook.com/LizMilliron, or follow her on Twitter (@LizMilliron).
Terrance V. Mc Arthur
Terrance V. Mc Arthur, born in California, lives in Sanger, CA (Go to Fresno and head east) with his wife, his daughter, the ashes of a cat who died at the age of 21, and more than 1,500 neckties. He is a libreller (library storyteller), a librician (library magician), a libreteer (library puppeteer), a libright (library playwright), a libroonist (library balloon artist), and a librarian (library librarian) for the Fresno (CA) County Public Library. He’s also a basket maker and a wire artist. His horror and dark fantasy stories (and a few poems) have appeared in anthologies from Thirteen O’Clock Press (Toybox, Once Bitten, Tales from the Graveyard, Midnight Ghosts, Mutant, Rain) and Peculiar Press’ Monsters & Mormons. This is his first published mystery story.
Betsy Bitner
Betsy Bitner is a recovering attorney who lives with her husband and children in the suburbs in upstate New York, where she holds the coveted title of Procrastinator-in-Chief. When Betsy’s not putting off doing household chores, she’s waiting until the last minute to write her award-winning humor column for the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.). You used to be able to read it online for free, but now you have to subscribe to the paper in order to access her column. Betsy would like to be able to give everyone who reads this book a gift subscription to the Times Union. She would also like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Neither one is likely to happen. You can read her columns, though, if you friend her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/betsy.bitner) or you can read her blog at https://confessionsfromthecul-de-sac.com.
DG Critchley
DG Critchley lives in northern New Jersey, but will deny it if pressed on the issue. This story features recurring characters the “Grymm Brothers,” who most recently appeared in Murder Among Friends, a charity anthology of mysteries for the John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace museum. Critchley feels exactly the same way about Pennsylvania Dutch baked goods as the narrator.
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