The More You Stir It: A Mystery Novel

Small-town newspaper editor Phil Larrison gets tangled up in another mystery in the picturesque hills, or knobs, of southern Indiana.

This time Phil, who first appeared in Safely Buried, gets involved with seventeen-year-old Kelly Marcott, whose mother has exiled him from Los Angeles to keep him out of trouble.

When the novel begins, Kelly is staying with his grandfather, Chester Marcott, on the old man's farm in Meridian County, but he's already gotten into trouble there. For the past few months he has been enrolled at Campbellsville High School, where he has started up an alternative newspaper called Mothermucker. He describes his paper as The Mother of All Muckrakers. In its pages he has criticized the school's administration, faculty, and athletic program, and he has made a lot of enemies.

Kelly has also stirred things up by publishing an expos in Mothermucker about the lynching of a black man behind the county courthouse in 1936. No one was ever arrested for that crime, and Kelly has accused more than two dozen local men of belonging to the Ku Klux Klan when it carried out the lynching nearly seventy-six years earlier. He wants any Klansmen who are still alive to be prosecuted for their crime, no matter how old they are now.

At first Phil considers Kelly rash and obnoxious, but once he gets to know him, Phil is impressed with Kelly, especially his interest in investigative reporting.

Ensuing events plunge Kelly and Phil into a complicated tale of brutality and murder; however, the story is not only about meanness and violence. Along the way, romantic feelings get stirred up too, both for Kelly and Phil.

A Note about Mysteries. . . .

I wrote Safely Buried and The More You Stir It in the first person to force myself to play fair with my readers. Both novels are narrated by Phil Larrison, and readers see all the action through his eyes. Phil doesn't hold anything back in order to spring a surprise at the end. Nevertheless, there are plenty of surprises.

John Pesta was editor and publisher of The Brownstown Banner, an Indiana weekly newspaper, for seventeen years. A few years after buying the paper, he and his wife, Maureen, began publishing it twice a week. They also built Brownstown’s first cable-television system, Banner Cablevision. The combined business was probably unique in so far as the paper’s two pressmen doubled as cable installers and technicians. Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Pesta received degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Virginia and spent a year at the University of London as a Fulbright fellow. Before he began writing novels, he wrote short stories that appeared in various literary magazines. He and Maureen live in the country next to the Jackson-Washington State Forest. They have two children, Jesse and Abigail, both of whom are journalists in New York.