What do I have in common with a Mormon mother of nine and an ex-Navy good ol’ girl from Georgia? We were the only three women—well, four, if you count the cook—hanging out with thirty-some men at a deer hunters’ lodge in the backwoods of southern Illinois.

I went not because I’m a fan of hunting trips but rather at the request of my husband, who, I suspect, wanted one of the few private rooms so he wouldn’t have to bunk in with a group of snoring guys. Taking a wife got him that room.

I also endured the road trip—two days there and two days back—to be sure this man didn’t overdo it driving for hours on end. The one time before when he went, he returned with a dangerous blood clot, probably from sitting too long while he drove 15 hours straight on his way home.  Wasn’t gonna happen again on my watch.  Eight hours a day was the maximum driving time, with a restful overnight stop mid-trip each way. Geezer travel, which is what we need these days.

But back to No-wheres-ville, Illinois. What did I do with all my time while the hubby was in the woods waiting for one of those XXL-sized deer to wander by?

I took walks up and down the nearby scenic dirt road with my new girlfriends. One afternoon, the Georgia friend and I went to the winery, where a band called Back in the Saddle was playing country music. Yee-haw!

Since Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder was in the hands of a critiquer, I took the sequel I began a couple of years ago, Life and Death in Narrow Creek, and started thinking about how to recast it as a cozy mystery.  As you can tell from the title, I already have a death to work with.  Shouldn’t be too hard to make that death, originally a heart attack, into a murder.

Also, as I was describing some of the people at the hunting lodge in a phone call to my youngest daughter, she suggested I write a cozy based on this trip.

Hmm. A mystery set in a secluded hunting lodge.  One of the hunters is found dead, shot through the heart.  Who did it and why?  Amateur detective Dee Ann Bulluck, trapped in the lodge with time to kill, decides to investigate….