Prairie Nightingale is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about Trailbreaker, the latest novel in the Prairie Nightingale mystery series.

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

Tell us about the novel that you live inside. Is it part of a series? If so, please tell us about the series too.

I’m here today to talk about Trailbreaker, which is the second book in the series named after me, Prairie Nightingale. And, look, I know that my name is a lot. My parents are hippies who named me “Prairie Lovesummer.” They let me choose my own last name when I was thirteen and deep in a hyperfixation on Florence Nightingale. Do I regret it? Not exactly, but I do get it that my name is a lot to get used to. The truth is, I’m a lot to get used to, so it fits. The first book about me is Homemaker, which tells about how I asked too many questions about Amber Jenkins’s purse in the schoolyard while waiting for my younger daughter to come outside and ended up helping the FBI catch a murderer. It’s also the story of how I became a private investigator. Trailbreaker is about my new agency, Prairie Hawk Investigations, and how we did with our first big case. Like, Dateline big.

Does the writer control what happens in the story, or do you get a say, too?

I like to think of us as a great big collaborative family. My writers, Ruthie and Annie, write all of the books together, side by side at the dining room table on their laptops, passing the writing baton back and forth as they’re continually interrupted by children, dogs, cats, or any one of the dozens of things that throws a mom off track on any given day. It’s not so far off from my own busy life juggling investigation, parenthood, and my brand-new probably-happening situationship with the widower FBI agent I met on the Lisa Radcliffe case. The writers listen to me, I listen to them, we all listen to the editors, and hopefully readers get the best possible book out of the deal.

How did you evolve as the main character?

I started as an idea—or, really, as a question my writers had. Wouldn’t the very best detective be a mom? Because moms notice everything. Moms have to notice everything in order to take care of people, and to take care of their communities, and to take care of the world. We expect moms to be able to take the emotional temperature of a room or a situation, to know the right questions to ask, to know who is safe and who isn’t, to keep our community history, and to turn observations into narrative every single day. That’s a detective, right? The person who notices, who analyzes, and who makes a story. So Annie and Ruthie started talking about what would happen if a mom who had it all together—a homemaker to end all homemakers, who always had posterboard and a trifold in the closet for a last-minute school project and never failed to turn in her kids’ permission slips on time—found herself in a position to discover things about a missing woman in her circle of friends. And what if this brand-new amateur sleuth was someone who had a little bit of a problem with curiosity? And an hangup about always doing the next right thing? That’s me. That’s how they invented me. The rest, we did together.

Do you have any other characters you like sharing the story with? If so, why are you partial to them?

Oh, for sure! I’m a collaborator—I couldn’t do any of this on my own. In fact, every single one of the people who helped me solve my first mystery is now part of my team. I started Prairie Hawk Investigations as an equal partner with Joyce, my ex-mother-in-law, who still lives in an apartment connected to my house and retired from a career at the Department of Natural Resources; Marian, who used to be my personal assistant and now runs our office with terrifying efficiency and connections to everyone in Brown County, Wisconsin, who could possibly be useful to us; and my daughter Anabel’s former crush, Emma Cornelius, a recent high school graduate with a true crime podcast who is terrifyingly smart. We get occasional help from the FBI agent I mentioned, Foster Rosemare, who may or may not be my boyfriend—I’m still trying to figure that out. (And my kids pitch in now and then, although I do try to stop them.)

What’s the place like where you find yourself in this story?

I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is the kind of small city that people only live in if they’re from here. I’m not. My ex-husband, Greg, grew up here, and when I was pregnant with our first kid, Anabel, he accepted a job and moved us across the country from Seattle without so much as consulting me. (There’s a reason we’re divorced.) But that was fifteen years ago, and I’ve made friends with my adopted city. There’s a lot to love about a flyover state like Wisconsin, even if a city the size of Green Bay rarely makes it into stories that aren’t about football!

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

There’s something a book reviewer recently said about me that stuck in my head. She said that the thing my former friends can’t forgive me for isn’t that I’m nosy, it’s that I’m right. She wrote: “And Prairie being right about something being wrong has a tendency to expose a whole lot of ugly secrets and dirty little lies that people around her have been pretending not to notice” (Marlene Harris at Reading Reality). I love this, and I think it’s true. I grew up in a rural Oregon cohousing community that was basically a commune by another name. I believe in community. I love people. I’m a women-centered, justice-focused midwestern mom of two daughter’s who’s constitutionally allergic to pretending not to notice the ugly secrets and dirty little lies that prop up the worst of the systems that hold people down—and if that sounds like a private investigator you can get behind, I’d love for you to give the series a try!

Thank you for answering my questions, Prairie, and good luck to you and your authors, Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare, with Trailbreaker, the latest book in the Prairie Nightingale mystery series.

Readers can learn more about Prairie and her authors, Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare by visiting the authors’ website and their Facebook: http://facebook.com/ruthieknox and https://www.facebook.com/anniemareromanceauthor and Instagram: @ruthieknoxromance and @spinsterpress pages.

The novel is available at the following online retailers:

Amazon – Bookshop.org – Barnes & Noble

About the authors: Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare write critically acclaimed, bestselling mystery and romance, usually (but not always) together. They are the authors of the Prairie Nightingale mysteries and the TV Detectives mystery series. If you want more of their stories, check out their queer romances co-written as Mae Marvel, as well as solo work by Ruthie Knox (het romance), Annie Mare (grounded queer paranormal romance), and Robin York (Ruthie’s pen name for New Adult romance). Ruthie and Annie are married and live with two teenagers, two dogs, multiple fish, two glorious cats, four hermit crabs, and a bazillion plants in a very old house with a garden.