Murdermobile

It's pre-"Portlandia" Portland, when bookmobiles still roamed the Earth. When the retired head librarian is found dead in the City Library's bookmobile, it's no longer business as usual for fiery-haired librarian-on-wheels Hester Freelove McGarrigle. Does the murder have something to do with the wacko book-banning group with which the old woman was entangled? It's up to Hester and her dishy, trail-running, pizza-obsessed neighbor, Detective Nate Darrow, to chase clues all over Oregon's quirky Rose City. Their mutual connection with Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with Hester's upchucking Maine Coon cat, build the romantic fizz in this cozy mystery spiked with humor and an authentic Northwest sense of place. Fasten your seatbelt -- and hold tight to your armload of books -- for the flash-bang ending high atop Crown Point in the spectacular Columbia River Gorge. Want great literature? Read "War and Peace." Want a rollicking good read for a weekend or vacation? Try this debut novel from one of Portland's last bookmobile librarians and her travel-writer husband, writing together under the pen name B.B. Cantwell.

B.B. Cantwell is the pen name for the wife/husband writing team of Barbara and Brian Cantwell, of Seattle. We lived 10 happy years in Portland, Ore., where our Portland Bookmobile Mysteries are set, but have always had family in Seattle, so we spent a lot of hours driving back and forth on I-5 -- perhaps the most boring three hours of freeway you’ll find (on a cloudy day when the mountains aren’t visible, which is most of the time). So after Barbara started writing a mystery novel, we got to talking out ideas and plot lines as we drove, trip after trip, and it became a joint effort. And it was, well, a hoot. Barbara worked on the bookmobile in Portland -- including a run into the scenic Columbia River Gorge -- and served as librarian to pretty much all the off-kilter characters you’ll read about in ＂Murdermobile.＂ She’s the big-idea half of the writing duo. Brian, a newspaper journalist, helps rein it in to reality (but not too far), helps fill out details and tends to the editing. Along the way, between the two of us, it’s like we’ve created our own Imaginary Friends in protagonists Hester McGarrigle, the librarian on wheels, and Detective Nate Darrow, the OCD-ish, trail-running detective who drinks his coffee with way too much sugar. We’re having great fun crafting cozy mysteries that are a little quirky, just like Portland. These days we live on a sailboat in Seattle, when we aren’t at our cabin in Washington’s San Juan Islands collaborating on our next book (or cleaning out gutters, or chopping firewood, or chasing squirrels away from the bird feeder). And now we have friends and family in Portland -- so we still do that drive.