Jennie Marts is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about Take the Honey and Run, her first novel in the Bee Keeping Mystery series.

Welcome, Jennie. Let’s get started, shall we?

Tell us about your novel. Is it part of a series? If so, please tell us about the series too.

My new book, TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN, is the first in a fun new Bee Keeping Cozy Mystery series. And after having over thirty books published, I’m so excited that this will be my first hardback. Yay!

TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN is the story of Bailey Briggs, a single mom mystery author, who returns home to her small mountain town of Humble Hills, Colorado. She and her twelve-year-old daughter, Daisy, arrive to hear her grandmother, Granny Bee, threatening to kill the town mayor. The next morning, Bailey discovers the mayor’s dead body, and Granny Bee’s Honey I’m Home Hot Spiced Honey turns out to bee the murder weapon. Now Granny’s got herself into a sticky situation, and Bailey has to use her fictional detective skills to solve a real murder and keep her grandmother from ending up bee-hind bars.

Oh, and did I mention that upon arriving in town, she runs into Sawyer Dunn, the love of her life, whom she hasn’t seen in thirteen years, not since he got shipped off to his uncle’s farm in Montana the night they stole a tractor and accidentally drove it into a pond? And did I also mention that Sawyer now happens to be the town sheriff?

The next book in the series, KILL OR BEE KILLED, comes out next Spring. It’s about the annual Bee Festival in Humble Hills, and when the celebrity host of the Honey Bake-off is murdered, Bailey’s bestie is the prime suspect. So, Bailey and her granny’s book club, The Hive, are back on the case.

Where did the idea for the mystery that is central to the story come from?

My husband’s career has been with County Parks, and he became a certified beekeeper so he could add a living beehive exhibit to one of his nature centers. It’s a glassed-in hive so visitors can see the bees at work. He has shared so many fascinating stories with me about the life and habits of bees that I knew that I wanted to have a beekeeper in one of my books. The main character’s grandmother is the beekeeper in Take the Honey and Run, and all the Brigg’s women are named after flowers. I thought that if I was going to have a beekeeper as the murder suspect, then honey had to be the murder weapon.

Is there a theme or subject that underlies the story? If so, what prompted you to write about it?

I think the theme of this book might be Dating Can Be Deadly, since the town’s mayor seemed to be dating and occasionally extorting half the women in town. Passion is often a good motivation for murder, so I thought it would be fun to have a villain who was a bit of a geriatric gigolo, and who was wooing several women in town. But this story also has greed, envy, blackmail, and a few other sticky situations.

The theme could also be honey-inspired recipes, because there are several of those too. 😊

How do you create your characters? Do you have favourite ones? If so, why are you partial to them?

I think as a storyteller, the characters just come to us. I knew that I wanted the main character to be a single mom mystery writer and I knew I wanted her grandmother to consider herself the queen bee and to have her book club and besties called The Hive. I was very close to both of my grandmothers growing up, so I really love to add spunky, spitfire older ladies into my books and I love giving them some of the funniest lines. Because a lot of the older ladies I know have experienced life and usually have quite hilarious opinions about it. I also love writing about the relationships of women and how they support each other. I have four sisters plus a great friend group, and I love showing women caring about each other and lifting each other up. Or in the case of this book, providing alibi’s for and possibly breaking and entering to help keep each other out of trouble.

How do you bring to life the place you are writing about?

I love writing about small towns and the quirky characters that live there. I’m from a small town in Kansas and lived in a small town in Montana for a while as an adult, so I know first-hand the sense of community and the way people care for and about each other in a small town. I try to show that in my books. Yes, it’s true, in super small towns, people do mostly all know each other, but that means that they also know when someone is in trouble or needs a helping hand or a cheerleader or a prayer. And I’ve met a lot of those quirky characters who live in those towns. Not that every character is based on a real person, but several of my characters are based on a composite of a few people. And I also try to bring in the feel and the flavor of the actual town, what it looks like, what kind of shops are there, what kind of restaurants. In Humble Hills, the small town in Take the Honey and Run, Bailey’s best friend and her grandmother have a local coffee shop and bakery right down the road from the one hotel in town. Readers get to visit the courthouse and meet the security guard and the mayor’s secretary. I think when readers visit the places, it brings the small town more to life in their minds.

What research do you do to provide background information to help you write the novel?

I love to use people I know to help with research, like my next-door neighbor who is a police officer, my dad and sister who are veterinarians, my friend’s husbands who are lawyers, doctors, firefighters. For years, I worked at a bank inside of a grocery store, and if I needed help, I would have the tellers tell me when the local firefighters came in (they shopped for groceries every few days), then I would hijack them in the produce department to ask them questions about my latest manuscript. I had a guy I opened an account for who was a retired FBI Agent who was a great resource, and once I stopped two mounted police officers who were on horseback in the parking lot to ask them a few questions about DNA and being a sheriff of a small town. My internet history is nuts with crazy searches like ‘how big is a pygmy goat’s poop’ for a goat yoga scene I did, ‘which is the best gun for a single woman to carry’, ‘which poison can use to kill someone and not leave a trace’, ‘why do goats faint’, ‘how much does a Kitchenaid mixer weigh’ (murder weapon), and ‘how long does it take a dead body in a hot tub to start to bloat’. If I don’t know the answer, I always do the research to make sure I’m getting the details right, but I try not to go too far down the research rabbit holes, or I’d never get the books written.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers about the book?

I hope that readers find and fall in love with the characters in Take the Honey and Run! I had the best time writing this book, and I think it’s so much fun. It’s twisty and funny and has a little romance and has honey-inspired recipes at the end of some of the delicious treats the characters eat in the book. And also, a big thank you to you for having me!

Thanks for answering my questions, Jennie, and good luck with Take the Honey and Run, the first book in Bee Keeping Mystery series.

Readers can learn more about Jennie and her writing by visiting her website and her Facebook and Instagram pages. You can also follow her on Twitter.

The novel is available at the following online retailers:

Amazon – B&N – Kobo – Bookshop.org – Alibris

About Jennie Marts: Jennie is the USA TODAY Best-selling author of award-winning books filled with love, laughter, and always a happily ever after. Readers call her books “laugh out loud” funny and the “perfect mix of romance, humor, and steam.” Fic Central claimed one of her books was “the most fun I’ve had reading in years.” She is living her own happily ever after in the mountains of Colorado with her husband, two dogs, and a parakeet who loves to tweet to the oldies. She’s addicted to Diet Coke, adores Cheetos, and believes you can’t have too many books, shoes, or friends.

Her books range from Western romance to cozy mysteries, but they all have the charm and appeal of quirky small-town life. She loves genre-mashups like adding romance to her Page Turners cozy mysteries and creating the hockey-playing cowboys in the Cowboys of Creedence. The same small-town community comes to life with more animal antics in her latest Creedence Horse Rescue series. And her sassy heroines and hunky heroes carry over in her heartwarming, feel good romances from Hallmark Publishing. Her newest cozy mystery, Take the Honey and Run: A Bee Keeping Mystery, debuts this July.