New Release | Chilled to the Dog Bone by S.A. Kazlo #cozymystery #newrelease #bookboost
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    • Mar 5
    • 6 min read

New Release | Chilled to the Dog Bone by S.A. Kazlo #cozymystery #newrelease #bookboost



Title Chilled to the Dog Bone

 

Author S. A. Kazlo

 

Genre Cozy Mystery

 

Publisher Gemma Halliday Publishing

 

Book Blurb

 

It's Saint Patrick's Day weekend in upstate New York, and Samantha Davies is excited about the annual outdoor games put on by the local fire company... that is until the grumpy rival fire chief is found dead on the ice! To make matters worse, Sam's fingerprints are all over the evidence at the murder scene. Can Sam find the killer and clear her name before the Luck of the Irish runs out for her?

 

It's Saint Patrick's Day weekend in chilly upstate New York, and Samantha Davies, children's picture book author and sometime sleuth, is excited to attend the annual outdoors games put on by the local Wings Falls fire company. It will be a weekend filled with fun activities such as a skillet toss, four-wheeler race, and the ever-popular decorated wooden outhouse race across the ice. Sam is looking forward to dancing the night away with her beau, police detective Hank Johnson at the Firefighter's Ball. Sam's rug hooking group, the Loopy Ladies is sponsoring one of the outhouses and their senior member, Gladys O'Malley, will have the honor of riding on the "throne" to the finish line. Only not all goes as planned when the neighboring fire company's chief is found in Gladys' place—frozen solid and dead as a doornail! To make matters worse, both Gladys' and Sam's fingerprints are all over the evidence at the murder scene, taking them from attendees to suspects. Now it's up to Sam to clear their names and get to the truth. The only problem is the victim had disagreements with almost everyone in town, from the Wings Falls fire chief to a sexy blonde named Sunny Foxx—with two xx's—and a slew of other suspects. Can Sam find the killer before the Luck of the Irish runs out for her? Or will she become chilled to the bone when the killer catches up to her...

 

Excerpt

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

"How do I look? Should I wear a crown?" Gladys O'Malley, the senior member of my rug hooking group, the Loopy Ladies, sat on her "throne" in the outhouse we were sponsoring. The outhouse race would take place on Sunday morning. This weekend, the Firemen's Convention was being held at the Civic Center in Lake George, a resort town in upstate New York. My local fire company, Wings Falls Fire Department, was the host. It was held annually as close to Saint Patrick's Day as possible. Fun and green beer abounded. All the local fire companies who attended entered a homemade outhouse, decorated by a local group, like the Loopy Ladies, who'd volunteered to sponsor this year's outhouse for our hometown fire company. We often lent our services and talents to worthy causes. This past fall, we sold small rugs we hooked to raise money for Camp Adirondack, a summer camp that invites kids from the inner city for two weeks of fun in the fresh mountain air.

 

I stomped my feet. Even though I wore my warmest fleece-lined boots and a pair of heavy wool socks, cold seeped through from the cement floor of my garage. A space heater blasted out warm air but barely made a dent in the freezing March air flowing into the drafty garage. I glanced at my cousin, Candie, and noticed her tugging a purple wool cap over her ears to stave off the cold air. I envied my dachshund, Porkchop, Candie's calico cat, Dixie, and the newest member of her family, Annie, a small dog of indeterminate breed, snuggled on the rug next to the fireplace in my living room.

 

Helen Garber poked at the bright-orange glasses sliding down her nose. "Haul your skinny old butt out of there and help us finish hanging the rugs we hooked on the wall of the outhouse, so we can get out of this blooming cold."

 

I rolled my eyes towards the rafters of my garage. Leave it to Helen to pick a fight with Gladys. She was the most outspoken member of the group. Her tongue knew no boundaries. She often said she "told it like it is." Not only did her tongue know no boundaries, but neither did her wardrobe choice. The louder and bolder the color, the better. Today her ample figure sported a lemon yellow jacket she paired with hot pink pull-on polyester slacks.

 

I walked over to the outhouse and admired our handiwork. We had painted green shamrocks over a white background in honor of Saint Patrick's Day on the outside walls.

 

Candie stood next to me. "Not a bad painting job, don't y'all think?"

 

I smiled. My cousin had moved north over fifteen years ago from Hainted Holler, Tennessee, and you could still cut her thick southern accent with a knife.

 

"We Loopy Ladies are a multi-talented group. Not only can we hook with the best of them, but we wield a mean paintbrush, too." I turned to the six of us who were gathered in my garage. "Don't you agree, ladies? Our outhouse will leave the others in the dust."

 

Cheers erupted from my fellow hookers. There are usually twelve of us who gather every Monday morning at our friend Lucy Foster's rug hooking studio. Although our absent members were busy elsewhere, everyone had contributed a rug to decorate the outhouse.

 

Susan Mayfield clapped her hands to get our attention. "We'd better finish hanging our rugs. Hank, Mark, and Brian will be here shortly to lift the outhouse onto the back of Brian's truck. They need to drive it to the staging area for the race on Sunday morning."

 

Susan and her husband, Brian, own Momma Mia's, which I believe is the best Italian restaurant this side of the Big Apple. Brian had volunteered his truck for transporting our outhouse to the race's starting area, a park next to the Civic Center. The racecourse was covered with snow and groomed to perfection for the outhouses. Hank Johnson, my boyfriend, and Mark Hogan, Candie's newly minted husband, were going to help provide the brawn to lift the outhouse on and off the truck. There were official rules for the race. The outhouse had to weigh two-hundred-and-fifty pounds and measure four feet wide by five feet tall. Once at the park, the fellows would attach skis to the bottom of the outhouse to help it move smoothly across the snow. Every outhouse had to have a rider, and this year, we had nominated Gladys for the honor.

 

"Need a hand up?" I asked Gladys as she tottered a bit when she tried to push off the wood board that served as the seat in the outhouse—or, as she liked to call it, her throne.

 

Gladys patted her green-dyed curls. She changed the color of her hair to match a season or event—orange for the fall, red for Valentine's Day. Last summer she even dyed her hair violet to coordinate with the color scheme of Candie's wedding.

 

Gladys pushed away the hand I offered her for assistance. "What do you think I am, an old lady?" She rose and exited the outhouse.

 

I heard chuckles as she joined the rest of us, and I swear Helen said, "Yeah, older than dirt," under her breath.

 

Jane Burrows picked up the stack of small rugs we needed to attach to the inside walls of the outhouse. "Let's see what we have and where to hang them." Ever the organized one, she was our town's librarian, but she also had a vested interest in the convention since her boyfriend, Jim Turner, was the chief of our town's fire company. Like me, Jane had found true love late in life, although I didn't feel the midfifties as being all that old. She had lived most of her life with her mother. Me, I was divorced after being married for twenty-five years.

 

Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Author Biography

 

Syrl, a retired teacher, lives in upstate New York with her husband and two lively dachshunds. She writes the Samantha Davies Mystery series, featuring Samantha Davies and her loveable dachshund, Porkchop. When not writing she is busy hooking, rug hooking that is, and enjoying her family. Her newest book, number five in the series, Chilled to the Dog Bone, will be released March 5th.

 

Social Media Links

 

Twitter - @sakazlo

LInkedin- sakazlo

Facebook-S.A.Kazlo

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