Take the Honey and Run by Jennie Marts

Jenn McKinlay: Today's guest knows her beesiness. Sorry, couldn't resist! But seriously, with the hum of bumble bees in the summer air, what better time to have a visit from a mystery series that has gone to the bee keepers? Here's Jennie to tell us more about it!

Jennie Marts: Thanks so much to the Jungle Red Writers for inviting me to spend a day on their blog. I’m really thrilled to be here! I’m Jennie Marts, and I write small town stories with humor and heart. My books range from cozy mystery to romantic comedies to western romance. 

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My new book, TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN, is the first in a fun new Bee Keeping Cozy Mystery series. And after having over thirty books published, I’m so excited that this will be my first hardback. Yay! 

TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN is the story of Bailey Briggs, a single mom mystery author, who returns home to her small mountain town of Humble Hills, Colorado. She and her twelve-year-old daughter, Daisy, arrive to hear her grandmother, Granny Bee, threatening to kill the town mayor. The next morning, Bailey discovers the mayor’s dead body, and Granny Bee’s Honey I’m Home Hot Spiced Honey turns out to bee the murder weapon. Now Granny’s got herself into a sticky situation, and Bailey has to use her fictional detective skills to solve a real murder and keep her grandmother from ending up bee-hind bars. 

Oh, and did I mention that upon arriving in town, she runs into Sawyer Dunn, the love of her life, whom she hasn’t seen in thirteen years, not since he got shipped off to his uncle’s farm in Montana the night they stole a tractor and accidentally drove it into a pond? And did I also mention that Sawyer now happens to be the town sheriff?

I had so much fun writing this book! My husband is a certified beekeeper, and he has always told such fascinating stories about the life and habits of bees, that I knew I had to incorporate them into a story somehow. Granny Bee is the beekeeper in this book, and her book club, affectionately known as The Hive, consists of her two spinster sisters (who live in an old purple Victorian called Lavender Manor), Rosa Delgado, and town librarian, Dottie Duffield. 

Bailey and her sidekick bestie, Evie Delgado Espinoza (Rosa’s granddaughter), have been described as a mashup of Lucy & Ethel and Thelma & Louise trying to solve a murder. 

Granny Bee loves to bake and is always offering up honey-inspired dishes, so I knew I had to add recipes to this book. When I told my mom, who is a fabulous cook, this, she insisted we spend the day in the kitchen testing out all the recipes and finding the best ones for the book. 

What a day we had! Mom came over around ten that morning, and I finally finished cleaning everything up around midnight. Whew! There were different variations of several of the recipes, and we wanted to make sure we picked the best ones, so our plan was to bake all day and create several recipes then have the family over for dinner to be our guinea pigs…um…I mean, our taste testers. 

I think we made sixteen recipes in all. We tried two variations of whipped ricotta cheese drizzled in honey, and the citrus flavor won over the cinnamon. We made honey banana bread and honey pound cake. We tried three versions of honey butter. We made honey lemonade and two versions of the specialty danish from Evie and Rosa’s bakery, Cream-Cheese Quesitos. We made a honey cake with marshmallow frosting and crispy honey cookies. And of course, we had to find our favorite of three versions of the murder weapon, Granny Bee’s Honey I’m Home Hot Spiced Honey. 

I love this picture of my mom in her apron! And I love it even more because you can see my golden retriever, Cooper, who is the inspiration for the golden retriever in the book, peeking out from behind my mom, keeping a watchful eye on things and hoping a cookie falls on the floor. 

I will admit, we had a few duds…nobody liked the honey lemonade, except for the characters in the book, of course. They loved it. 

But overall, we made some delicious creations, and I think our favorite was the cream-cheese quesitos drizzled in honey. Sooo good! They were almost to die for! …But maybe not to kill for! 

I’d love for you to check out all the recipes and find out who used the hot spiced honey to murder the mayor in Take the Honey and Run. Humble Hills and Honeybuzz Mountain Ranch are full of fun and quirky characters, and I hope you love them as much as I do. 

Do you have any favorite recipes that you use honey in? I’d love to hear about them! I’m always on the lookout for new inspiration for the next book in the series, Kill Or Bee Killed, coming out next spring. Tell me about your favorite use for honey in the comments.

Thanks for hosting me today! I so enjoy the blog and was thrilled to be part of it today! 

You can find TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN here: 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719088/take-the-honey-and-run-by-jennie-marts/ 

Author Bio: 

Jennie Marts is the USA TODAY Best-selling author of award-winning books filled with love, laughter, and always a happily ever after. Readers call her books “laugh out loud” funny and the “perfect mix of romance, humor, and steam.” Fic Central claimed one of her books was “the most fun I’ve had reading in years.”

She is living her own happily ever after in the mountains of Colorado with her husband, two dogs, and a parakeet who loves to tweet to the oldies. She’s addicted to Diet Coke, adores Cheetos, and believes you can’t have too many books, shoes, or friends.

Her books range from western romance to cozy mysteries, but they all have the charm and appeal of quirky small-town life. She loves genre-mashups like adding romance to her Page Turners cozy mysteries and creating the hockey-playing cowboys in the Cowboys of Creedence. The same small-town community comes to life with more animal antics in her latest Creedence Horse Rescue series. And her sassy heroines and hunky heroes carry over in her heartwarming, feel good romances from Hallmark Publishing. Her newest cozy mystery, Take the Honey and Run: A Bee Keeping Mystery, debuts this July. 

Jennie loves to hear from readers. Follow her on Facebook at Jennie Marts Books, Twitter at @JennieMarts, and at @jenniemartswriter on Instagram. Visit her at www.jenniemarts.com and sign up for her newsletter to keep up with the latest news and releases.

Nancy Cole Silverman asks: "To bee or not to bee?"

HALLIE EPHRON: One of my favorite questions is: Where did you get the idea for your book? Because the answer is never the same and it's almost always something you'd least expect. And when we get a new series from a beloved author, I'm even more fascinated to know where the ideas came from.

Today we're welcoming Nancy Cole Silverman, author of the radio reporter Carol Childs mysteries, with her second novel featuring  Misty Dawn, former psychic to the stars.

So where did the idea come from? To get there, she sought the answers to some very unusual questions, like: How do you milk a bee? 

NANCY COLE SILVERMAN: I never imagined when I began to think about a topic for my next book, THE HOUSE THAT VANITY BUILT, that a bee sting would inspire me. But it was the result of such an accident that led me to research bees and ultimately to the realization that nature had just handed me a most unsual modus operandi.

To start, however, I needed to do a little research. For instance, did you know that for bees to make one pound of honey, they must gather nectar from two million flowers? That’s a lot of flowers, and while the average honey bee can fly as fast as 15 miles per hour, SHE-- because it’s the female bee that does all the work—can only visit 50 to 100 flowers per trip. Male bees are just around for mating purposes until the Queen Bee is done with them and kicks them from the hive. The clincher, however, had less to do with honey and more to do with that nasty stinger in my swollen finger. Bee venom is today’s new Botox!

Bingo!

The idea that bee venom is one of the go-to products used in cosmetics today grabbed me, and my writer’s mind suddenly lit up with ideas.

But first, I needed to know, how would someone—for lack of better term—milk a bee? I had to assume there was a safe way to extract a bee’s venom without killing the bee or getting stung. I’m an environmentalist and hated to think, despite my swollen finger, that some poor bee had to give up its life for the sake of a few wrinkles.

I needn’t have worried. There is a safe way for beekeepers to extract venom without harming the bees, and if I wanted, I could download a simple step-by-step guide that would show me how to build one. I took a pass on building the trap, but the idea of how easy it would be to make one got this writer’s overactive imagination to wander. If bee venom could be extracted for cosmetics, might it also be used as a lethal weapon? Various studies indicate 5 percent of our population is allergic to bee venom and may be extremely sensitive to bee stings or life-threatening issues if stung. It didn’t take much to put together a scenario whereby someone with access to bees would target my victim. Before I knew it, my story was coming together, and I was plotting yet another murder for my aging, heroine psychic Misty Dawn and her sidekick shade Wilson Thorne.

Research can take writers down some unusual paths. When I first began the Misty Dawn series, I interviewed several psychics. I wasn’t looking for a reading—I remain very much on the fence when it comes to psychics— but because I wanted a better understanding of who they are and what types of people visited them, I asked a lot of questions. In return, I got a lot of surprising and unexpected answers about psychics and their clients, including some shady information about visitations from the other side of the veil!

How about you, Reds, has your research led you down a few rabbit holes you didn’t expect? And readers, have you ever wondered just how far some writers are willing to go to test a theory? Let’s dish. I’ve told you mine, tell me yours.

HALLIE: Such a fascinating thought process. Thanks for sharing, Nancy. 

My research has taken me... to a brain bank (did you know FedEx ships human brains?)  and an MRI lab (I needed to know how noisy IS IT inside one of those things) and a doll hospital and a meeting of professional organizers... 

What's the weirdest research you've done to answer your own pressing questions?? (And Nancy, I hope you'll also share where Misty came from... psychic to the stars?? I'm intrigued!)

Help! I've lost my voice!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Sick sick sick. I am sick. I have laryngitis.

And what’s more Jonathan has laryngitis, too. But his is different. He started with laryngitis, and it turned into coughing.

I started with laryngitis, and it stayed laryngitis.

We are quite the pair. The doctor told Jonathan: One, it's not contagious And two,  the only thing that can cure it is –not talking. So we’ll be riding along in the car, silent.  I’ve got to tell you, that is weird. From time to time I’ll think—what’s wrong with him? Is he upset? Then I remember—he’s trying not to talk. And we know, whispering is not a good alternative--it makes it worse.

Not so easy for me, on so many levels. My whole life is about talking. I had to tape a script the other day for an upcoming story—and I sound all croaky. So I’ll have to re-do the whole thing when my voice comes back. (It's called "doing a scratch track." Perfectly named, right? In the old days of analog video tape, I learned to say the same thing with an un-sick voice in exactly the same time—otherwise, it ruined the videoed it. Now with digital, it’s easier.)

And the other day I had to give a speech in from of 150 or so people! So I slugged down a cup of tea and honey  (which was more like a cup of honey with tea) which seemed to coat my throat enough to manage. I was very Brenda Vaccarro (Demi Moore?) sounding—and the audio guy pumped the microphone level so I could speak softly. It worked.

We have gulped tea and honey, sipped hot water and lemon, rested out voices.  We still sound like a froggy duet.

Do you have any laryngitis remedies? Have you ever had it? What did you do? 

HALLIE EPHRON: When I taught school I got it a couple of times a year. The only cure is: Shut. Up. Really your vocal cards need to recover. Tea with honey and a little bourbon is nice, too.


RHYS BOWEN: Poor you! John has had a cough that has lingered on and it's not fun for either of us. But I do have a couple of suggestions for laryngitis. I have hung out with singers at various times in my life (opera chorus etc) and my daughter studied to be an opera singer. Pineapple juice is great for throats. Also hot water with apple cider vinegar and honey in it, sipped slowly. These are what singers take. Good luck!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Oh no! I know that weird feeling - why isn't he saying anything? and it's so frustrating when the answer is because he can't. I'm terrible at keeping my mouth shut (which will surprise none of you.) I rely on the old standby, hot strong honey and lemon tea. I also find my grandmother's receipt for a sore throat works better than any over-the-counter soother: make a glass of warm salt water - as salty as you can stand - and use it as a gargle. Salt on inflamed tissues sounds counterintuitive, but you'll feel so much better afterwards. She was also a big believer in a spoonful of medicinal blackberry brandy, which I suppose worked like Nyquil does today. I like Hallie's idea - if you have enough bourbon, at least you won't CARE about the laryngitis anymore.

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Poor Hank! Poor Jonathan! And poor me--now deprived of seeing or holding my new granddaughter for more than a week. I came down with the Horrid Cold the day she came home from the hospital. Isn't that the pits? And then five days later, Rick got it, too, so our whole house is going to be a no-go zone even longer. (Everything on the web says cold viruses can be contagious up to two weeks!!! Flu, actually, is not as bad...) Thankfully, neither of us has laryngitis. We're just coughy and croaky. Cure for laryngitis? I'm with Julia, the warm salt water gargle. That was my grandmother's remedy. For soothing the throat, hot water with lemon and lots of honey. For a tickly cough, lemon juice, honey, and a good slug of brandy (my mom's remedy.)  Eventually we will all get well…

HANK: But isn't it funny how "well" seems so impossible? I know it will happen, but somehow it seems so far away.

LUCY BURDETTE: Sorry you guys, hope you all get healthy soon! I have no great remedies to add, but I sure wouldn't dare use the salt water gargle cure with my new condition! so I'm lathering my hands with lavender-scented hand sanitizer and hoping for the best...

HANK: Yup. Gargling Salt water, and it does work.  And honey is miraculous. And SLEEP! Love it.  So Reds readers, any secret cures? Medicine, or not? Oscillococcinum? Zinc? And how are you all doing on winter colds and flu? Any victims yet? And any good cold remedies?  Do you believe in hand sanitizer? We need to make an arsenal of healing….weigh in on remedies!