Troubled Water: An Aging Ain’t for Wimps Mystery
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – Northern Florida
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Misterio Press LLC
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 28, 2026

Synopsis

What does it say about you when your coming-of-age story begins at seventy-one?

Amy Bridges Parker asks herself that question as she resists her domineering sister’s attempts to take over where her subtly controlling and recently deceased husband left off.

Then her sister Clara turns up dead! And a young man claiming to be the grandson of Amy’s first husband—the one who died in Vietnam fifty-two years ago—gives the sheriff a prime suspect. The boy had a grudge and must have gone after the wrong sister.

Amy isn’t convinced. She can’t really explain why, but she likes the young man. And she knows better than most that her sister, a mean girl back in high school, had plenty of old enemies. But who hated Clara enough to actually kill her? Or did the killer get the wrong sister after all?

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Guest Post

Creating a Cozy Town

by Kassandra Lamb

My new cozy mystery series, the Aging Ain’t for Wimps Mysteries, is about a recent widow, Amy Parker, who is finding herself at the age of seventy-one.

When starting a new series, there are so many decisions to make, such as where it will be set.

In any fiction story, setting is important, but especially in cozy mysteries, which are often set in small towns. My new series is set in the fictitious town of Heron Shores, where Amy has lived since she was ten years old—so essentially her entire life.

Creating these small town settings is both fun and a bit challenging. You have to think about all the moving parts that make up a community where people work and live. Where do they shop, go to school, worship, go to get their cars fixed?

In what state/country is the town located? What is the climate there?

My town of Heron Shores is in northern Florida. That means lots of foliage. Florida is a lush state (unless we’re having a drought). There are evergreens (mostly Southern pines) and deciduous trees (lots of Live Oaks), but also plenty of palm trees and tropical underbrush. And flowering bushes that bloom even in winter (camellias).

Indeed, my protagonist’s camellia bushes play a role in the story.

How big will the town be?

This is an important question. In a really small town of just a few hundred people, everybody will know everybody else.

I wanted my protagonist, Amy to be familiar with a lot of people in town, but not necessarily know everyone. Indeed, being a law-abiding citizen, she’s never met the town’s sheriff in person, before her husband passes away.

She gets to know him better though, as she pokes her nose into the investigation of her sister’s murder. Through this investigation, she encounters a lot of people from their high school years, which was several decades ago. I wanted her memory of some of them to be a bit spotty.

So I decided the town’s population in 1963 (the year her family moved there) would be around a thousand people. But during those ensuing decades, the town has grown a good bit. This is very true of most Florida towns and cities, especially those within commuting distance of major cities. The population of the entire state has quadrupled in the last 60 years.

Every town needs some form of law enforcement.

Will there be a police department or a sheriff’s office? How big will their department be?

If it’s an incorporated city, it will probably have a police department. Unincorporated towns in Florida are usually covered by the county’s sheriff’s office.

Sheriff Taylor of Heron County (fictitious and much smaller than even the smallest real county in Florida) just has five deputies, plus a civilian clerk, dispatchers, and a receptionist (who’s kind of young and flighty).

Mixing fiction with real places

My protagonist is a retired ER nurse, so her town has to be within commuting distance of a hospital. There is a hospital in Lake City (real town), the county seat of Columbia County (real county). So I sandwiched little fictitious Heron County between Columbia and Baker (also real) Counties.

And Baker is right next to Duval County and the very real big city of Jacksonville. This puts my fictitious town within a reasonable drive to the real Jacksonville International Airport. Amy’s son and other relatives fly into JAX to help her deal with the deaths of her husband and sister and to attend their funerals.

The cool thing about mixing in real places when appropriate is that it makes the fictitious setting seem more real, especially people who actually live in northern Florida. They will often think, “Oh, yeah, I know that town/hospital/airport.”

The layout of the town.

Last but not least, you have to keep the layout straight in your head as you’re writing the stories in the series. Is Heron Creek (after which the town is named) north or south of Amy’s house? (It’s north.) Who lives “nearby” and who “lives across town?” What buildings are mentioned as being located on Main Street?

To help me keep these things straight, I created a town map, using my handy-dandy graphics program. I ended up revising it many times, as I remembered yet more locations that are mentioned in the story.

It will be helpful to me as I write more stories in the series, but it was also a lot of fun to make—a different type of creativity for me. And it’s fun to be able to share it here with readers as well.

About the Author

Kassandra Lamb has two loves: writing and psychology. In her youth, she discovered that writers need day jobs in order to eat. Partial to food, she studied psychology. Now retired from a career as a psychotherapist and college professor, she spends most of her time in an alternate universe with her characters. The magic portal to this universe (i.e., her computer) is in Florida, where her husband and dog catch occasional glimpses of her. Kass has authored over 40 books, including four mystery series and a romantic suspense trilogy.

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