Widower and anthropologist Harry Lancaster and his Gen Z colleague Emma are back for more murder and mayhem when they stumble upon a dead farmer.This delightful sequel to A Field Guide to Murder is perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Benjamin Stevenson.
When an odd request leads Harry Lancaster to agree to meet his former sweetheart Willow at a farm on the outskirts of town, Emma’s suspicions run high, and she insists on joining him. Instead of Willow greeting them when they arrive, they discover the farm’s owner dead, with a corn rake embedded in his back.
After being interrogated by the police, Harry and Emma return to his home to find a bereft Willow, who admits she lost her life savings in a real estate scam involving the farm. Worried Willow will become the main murder suspect, Harry decides to help her, despite Emma’s concerns.
To bring the swindlers—and murderer—to justice, Harry recruits his potentially shady, financial-whiz brother and a neighborhood teenage hacker. Then Willow’s realtor is declared missing, and Harry’s brother is caught up in the fray.
As Harry, Emma, and team unearth clues, they increasingly dodge the police, stalkers, and danger in their race to save Willow and Harry’s brother before anyone else turns up dead.
Cozy mystery amateur sleuths always seem to stumble into solving murders with surprising results. Their day jobs may look ordinary on the surface, but once a mysterious death occurs, the skills required to run their businesses morph into investigative superpowers.
A pet groomer, a tea shop owner, or a bookseller may pick up clues that trained law enforcement misses entirely. These seemingly commonplace jobs provide a steady stream of social interaction, making amateur sleuths privy to gossip, attuned to everyday routines, and quick to spot behavior that’s suddenly off. Constant contact with their communities builds trust while offering credible reasons to ask probing questions. And because so many of these everyday heroes have either pursued their work as a lifelong passion or turned to it after some staggering setback, they’ll do anything to protect what they’ve built – including chasing down a cold-blooded killer.
For those of us who love these inventive mysteries, the range of professions that double as investigative platforms seems almost endless. But one profession that, in my opinion, doesn’t get enough credit as a good foundation for detection is anthropology.
In the early days of my career, I spent a decade helping rebuild communities after war across Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific. My job was to use my anthropological training to design and evaluate aid projects so they didn’t inflame existing tensions. This meant engaging with every walk of life and observing the full spectrum of human behavior. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this fieldwork doubled as a masterclass in writing crime fiction. The skills required were, in many ways, the same skills that make a great detective.
Noticing what most people don’t
A critical part of fieldwork is paying attention to small things: how people enter a room, where they sit, who speaks first, who makes eye contact with whom, and who carefully avoids it. When I couldn’t conduct interviews in English or French, I worked through interpreters, which forced me to read everything around the words themselves: body language, tone, hesitation, nervous tics, the sudden pivot to safer conversational ground. I became attuned to what was said, what wasn’t, and what the gap between the two might mean. That calibrated attention to detail is, at its core, an essential skill of detection.
Understanding that context is everything
Anthropologists are trained to ask why something exists in its particular form: why this object, in this place, used in this way, at this time? A detective asks the same questions at a crime scene. Every detail is a clue to something larger. The contents of a purse, for instance, can illuminate a person’s social world, economic circumstances, and private concerns, whether you’re an anthropologist reconstructing a life or a detective trying to understand why it ended.
Holding complexity without collapsing it
Anthropology demands that you suspend judgment, and fieldwork teaches you why. I witnessed the aftermath of unimaginable violence, but I also came to understand that the histories behind that violence rarely broke cleanly into victims and villains — more often individuals were a conflation of both. The ability to sit with moral ambiguity, to resist the easier story, is essential to good fieldwork. It’s also essential to good detection, where the obvious suspect is rarely the right one.
Moving between worlds
While in the field, I sat across tables from government ministers and subsistence farmers, community visionaries and stone-cold killers. Each conversation required a different approach; a different way of building trust, of making someone feel safe enough to say what they actually knew. The ability to adapt your persona without losing your footing is exactly the kind of social fluency that makes an amateur sleuth believable, and effective.
Trusting your instincts
Throughout my travels and work, when my gut told me something was wrong, it was. In fieldwork, ignoring that reflex can be dangerous. For a fictional detective, it’s the difference between solving the case and becoming part of it.
Applying these skills
Given all of this, it was hardly a stretch for me to make my amateur sleuth an anthropologist. I was able to give Harry Lancaster not just a profession for his backstory, but a whole way of seeing — one that I’d spent years developing in the field and that translated surprisingly well to the page. But anthropology is just one entry point.
What all great cozy mystery professions share is something more fundamental: they make the sleuth accessible and trustworthy, give them plausible reasons to ask questions, and position them to overhear secrets while moving through spaces where clues hide in plain sight. These sleuths don’t solve crimes through police procedure, they solve them by being socially embedded, sharply observant, and easy to underestimate. In cozy mysteries, the best detectives are the ones who would never seem like detectives at all.
A cranky widower and his spirited caregiver team up to solve his neighbor’s murder in this charming and original mystery, perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Benjamin Stevenson.
Michelle L. Cullen has lived and traveled all over the world, from working as a bilingual secretary in Paris to backpacking around Europe, Central America, and Southern Africa to helping rebuild communities after war throughout Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific — where she saw the best and worst of human behavior. Her lifelong fascination with people and why they do what they do, was further fueled by her academic training. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics’ Sociology Department and her master’s degree in anthropology from Melbourne University in Australia.
A fan of adventure, she has a black belt in Taekwondo, has summited 900 feet rock climbing, snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef, and hiked up an active volcano. She currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland, where she’s either doing yoga, playing outside, or plotting murder. She’s a proud member of International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and The Authors Guide, and has been gleefully reading and watching murder mysteries since the age of ten.
A Signed Copy, Binoculars, Field Notes Notebook, and a Few Bags of Tea (so winners can be like Harry)!
(Six Winners, USA Only)
Thanks so much for featuring book 2 in the Harry & Emma Mystery series. I truly appreciate your support!
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