Dead Drop in Lily Rock follows a newly unhoused hiker as a Fourth of July stopover turns into an investigation of a murder at a library where classic-book devotion and small-town secrets lead to an interesting culprit. What sparked the idea to make a library the crime scene, and to make books function as evidence?

A Little Free Library is one of the last places we’d expect violence. Quiet, ordered, built on the assumption that knowledge is shared freely and stories are preserved with care. That sense of safety is exactly what made it the right crime scene.

Mysteries disrupt what feels stable in a community. A murder in a back alley is tragic. A murder at a Little Free Library is personal. It unsettles a town’s sense of who it is. It forces people to ask not just who did this, but why would anyone violate a community service devoted to ideas?

In Dead Drop in Lily Rock, books aren’t props. They’re catalysts. They carry history, ideology, memory, and sometimes controversy. A bookmark can signal allegiance. A marginal note can reveal motive. A banned title tucked into a Little Free Library can expose fault lines in a community that otherwise prides itself on harmony.

I was also drawn to the metaphor: Libraries preserve stories. A murder investigation uncovers one.

In Lily Rock, stories matter. So when something violent interrupts that space, the truth has to be found between the lines.

Officer Janis “Jets” Jets’s sarcasm is practically a climate. How did her voice develop, and what role does she play in shaping the tone of the series?

Janis’s voice developed before Avery arrived in Lily Rock. She first appeared in the original Welcome to Lily Rock Mystery series, sent as an undercover cop during the holiday season. Once Olivia arrives, in Getaway Death, Janis becomes the counterweight to Olivia’s empathy. When Olivia leans into intuition and connection, Janis leans into process and proof.

Her sarcasm grew organically out of that tension.

Small-town policing is intimate. You’re not just enforcing laws, you’re dealing with neighbors, gossip, fragile reputations, and people you’ve known since high school. Sarcasm became Janis’s armor. It’s how she maintains authority without becoming brittle. It’s how she keeps her footing when emotion threatens to swamp the facts.

In the Avery Denning books, Janis serves as tonal ballast. Avery feels the world deeply—animals, shifts in energy, subtle emotional undercurrents. Janis cuts through that with sharp clarity. Her voice sharpens scenes, prevents sentimentality, and keeps the series from floating away into pure intuition.

If Avery listens to crows, Janis reads warrants and sometimes invents her own to make a point.

Lily Rock feels authentic down to Mayor Maguire’s bookmark celebrity. What’s your process for inventing those hyper-specific town details without overloading the story?

I treat Lily Rock like a real town with zoning restrictions and a Chamber of Commerce. Before I write, I quietly ask the following:

What would this town brag about?
What would they put on a postcard?
What would they argue about at the hardware store?

Mayor Maguire, the labradoodle with local celebrity status, began as a small detail. But once he existed, the town responded to him. Someone would absolutely put him on bookmarks. Someone else would roll their eyes about it. Others called him psychic without knowing why. That’s how details become an ecosystem rather than decoration.

The key to avoiding overload is restraint. I think of world-building like seasoning. The reader doesn’t need the entire spice rack. They need the right pinch at the right moment.

A Little Free Library doesn’t need a full architectural history. It needs one crooked hinge, a banned book tucked inside, and a note written in a hurried hand.

Specificity creates authenticity. Selectivity creates readability.

How do you design clue trails so they feel fair and still deliver a snap of surprise?

For me, fairness is sacred to a mystery.
I design clues in three layers:

1. Visible clues – The reader sees exactly what the sleuth sees. No hidden evidence withheld unfairly.
2. Misinterpreted clues – These are the magic ones. The clue is accurate, but its meaning is slightly bent by context emotion, or assumption.
3. Quiet clues – Small, almost throwaway details that only gain weight later.

The “snap” of surprise happens when a reader realizes: Oh. That was there the whole time.

I avoid surprise for shock’s sake. Instead, I aim for inevitability disguised as misdirection. The ending should feel both startling and earned.

And perhaps most important: I design suspect motivations before I design mechanics. If the emotional truth tracks, the clue trail will feel organic.

Mystery, at its heart, isn’t about trickery.
It’s about perception.

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