Where else could Aggie encounter wranglers with suspicious backgrounds, hapless dudes, heat, snakes, and poison ivy? I could hardly wait for Aggie to filter those characters and critters through her inimitable viewpoint. I’d even attended a working ranch camp in my youth. Why a dude ranch setting for Aggie’s second fiasco? Because, like many pubescent girls, I had loved horses. I set her second mystery caper, Dang Near Dead, at a Texas dude ranch. After alienating club members and misusing workout equipment, Aggie stumbled into murder.įor the series to continue, Aggie had to bump into murder someplace else. Thus, she’d enrolled in Aspects of Aging class and was struggling to get in shape at the local health club. She anonymously wrote the column “Adventures in Staying Young.” Single, 40-ish, and having moved to Texas to start over, she figured that before anyone discovered she claimed to be an “expert” on perpetual youth, she’d better shape up. Why did Aggie capture my imagination? As the only “mature” college student in a class of twentysomethings, Aggie was terrified of only one thing: middle-age decrepitude. I managed, but Aggie turned out to be correct: Her first mystery caper, Fit to Be Dead, was short-listed for Left Coast Crime’s 2013 Lefty Award for Best Humorous Mystery. Once Aggie planted herself in my brain, it was hard for me to finish that academic novel.
Aggie said she wouldn’t let me finish the novel I was working on until I promised to write a series about her. I was in the middle of writing a serious suspense novel, Nine Days to Evil, when Aggie Mundeen, sitting near my protagonist in a college classroom, demanded my attention. Below right: the author on horseback as a young girl Wrangling with aging, corraling crime, and riding off into the sunset.
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