The Birth or Death of a New Mystery Series

For the past two years, I have struggled with what to do with mystery ideas that didn’t fit the Cache Iron framework. The Cache Iron Mystery series, which I am currently working on Book 5 was planned for a 12-13 book series and took over a decade to craft the idea for the standalone stories that each book represents and the underlying story that pieces together amongst all the books.

So what do you do when you come up with what feels like a clever mystery, but it doesn’t serve your main characters’ series? One of my favorite authors is Agatha Christie, who didn’t limit herself strictly to a Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot but also delivered stories with Miss Marpe and Tommy and Tupperance.

In this spirit, I have decided to do the same, and I am currently plotting my second mystery series, the first novel of which I hope to debut in 2027, called Rest In Revenge.

The series tells the tale of two morticians in the fictional Maine town called Laurel Point. We have Becker Donnelly, third generation mortician who took over the Donnelly Funeral Home from his father and Morgan Kathwick, Becker’s university colleague, turned mortician who has been fascinated by death all of her life since she was clinically dead for two minutes on the operating table as a child. The two of them find each other at university. Morgan, fascinated with death, felt drawn to the mortician’s son, and Becker was taken with Morgan.

The two of them eventually take over the family funeral home, renaming it Becker Morgan Funeral Parlor.

The series will involve the two of them looking into the deaths of some people that they serve, where maybe natural causes wasn’t so natural. Right now I have three mysteries planned for the series, and I plan to share more details of the series here on my blog.