Travel the World with Bess Hall and her Friends!

Welcome to the Travel Blogger Cozy Mystery Series!

I’ve been working on a brand-new cozy mystery series, and I’m so excited to finally tell you about it. If you love mysteries, travel, beautiful destinations, great food, quirky characters, and a little family chaos, I think you’re going to love this one.

Meet Bess Hall, a twenty-seven-year-old travel blogger who has built the career most of us would happily squeeze into a carry-on for.

Bess has more than a million followers on social media and even more on her blog, writes destination features for magazines, and works with hotels, restaurants, tourism boards, and brands around the world. She knows how to find the café tourists walk right past, the neighborhood worth wandering through, the perfect hotel balcony, and the stories behind the landmarks everyone photographs.

She’s fashionable, outgoing, organized, comfortable in front of a camera, and very serious about her work. Traveling may look glamorous on social media, but behind every gorgeous photograph are deadlines, interviews, early-morning shoots, video editing, sponsored dinners, delayed flights, and the pressure of knowing one bad recommendation can reach a million people before breakfast.

There’s just one complication. Bess rarely travels alone. Her fifty-nine-year-old widowed mother Marie usually comes with her. And so does Hank, her mother’s miniature toy poodle.

Marie is everything Bess isn’t. She’s free-spirited, eccentric, a little hippie-ish, endlessly curious, and completely incapable of minding her own business. She talks to everyone. Worse, everyone talks back. Give her twenty minutes in a new city and she’ll have befriended a pastry chef, a hotel concierge, a street artist, a retired detective, a shopkeeper, somebody’s aunt, and possibly the man who was supposed to be keeping strangers out of a restricted area.

Bess adores her but would also occasionally enjoy locking her in the hotel room. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t stop her mother for long.

Because there is so much to Bess’s job, she employees her best friend, Cassie as her personal assistant. The two have been best friends since grade school, and Cassie keeps Bess grounded.

Travel Was Supposed to Be the Dangerous Part

Every book in the series will take Bess, her mother, Hank, and Cassie somewhere new.

Sometimes the destination will be in the United States. Sometimes they’ll head overseas. And while murder will occasionally interrupt the itinerary, not every mystery will involve a body.

There may be thefts, disappearances, blackmail, fraud, stolen artifacts, missing heirlooms, or other crimes connected specifically to the place Bess is visiting. That means each mystery gives us two adventures at once. We get to solve a crime, but we also get to travel.

I want these books to take us beyond the famous landmarks. We’ll visit cafés and markets, wander side streets, discover local restaurants, learn a little history, stay in interesting hotels, meet the people who actually live there, and, of course, eat very well.

Bess’s job also gives her the perfect excuse to ask questions. She interviews chefs, hotel owners, artists, historians, shopkeepers, locals, and travelers for a living. She photographs everything. She researches destinations before she arrives. And with more than a million followers watching her adventures, sometimes one of those followers may notice something Bess missed.

Her mother’s investigative technique is considerably less sophisticated. She simply asks everyone everything, and somehow, it works.

Cassie looks for the details the other two don’t see, and she always finds them.

And Hank?

Let’s just say a curious toy poodle can get into places his humans cannot.

First Stop: Paris

The first book in the series is Passport to Murder, and Bess and her team are headed to Paris.

This isn’t the trip that launches Bess’s career. She’s already successful when the series begins, and Paris is supposed to be another incredible assignment. She arrives with Cassie, Marie, and Hank to create a major collection of travel content featuring Paris beyond the standard tourist checklist. She has restaurants to visit, neighborhoods to explore, shops and cultural sites to feature, iconic attractions her followers expect to see, and additional work planned for a magazine feature.

Paris should be perfect.

Then Bess’s mother takes Hank for a morning walk near the Eiffel Tower and finds a body. Even worse, circumstances surrounding the discovery make the Paris police considerably more interested in Bess’s mother than Bess would prefer.

Suddenly, restaurant reservations, sponsored posts, photographs, and magazine deadlines don’t seem nearly as important because Bess has one priority.Figure out who the victim really was, uncover what happened, and prove her mother had nothing to do with it.

The investigation pulls Bess away from the Paris visitors see in travel brochures and into cafés, markets, boutiques, restaurants, hotels, neighborhoods, and side streets where secrets are much harder to photograph.

Meanwhile, her mother does exactly what Bess tells her not to do. She starts investigating and enlists Cassie’s help. And because apparently conducting an unofficial murder investigation in a foreign country isn’t enough, she also manages to acquire a charming Parisian man around her own age as an investigative sidekick.

Bess soon finds herself trying to solve a murder, keep her mother out of trouble, meet at least a few of her professional obligations, control Hank, and determine whether her mother has accidentally picked up a French boyfriend along the way.

Paris suddenly becomes a lot more complicated than anything Bess planned to post online.

More Than a Mystery Series

One of the things I’m most excited about is bringing Bess’s fictional travel world outside the books.

You may eventually see some of the things Bess would share with her own followers: her favorite Paris stops, what she packed for a particular trip, foods she tried, places she visited, destination tips, and even travel-blog-style posts written from Bess’s point of view.

Her mother and Hank as well as Cassie, are already familiar faces to Bess’s followers when the series begins, so readers will get to step into a travel brand and a family relationship that existed long before that first Paris mystery.

At the heart of everything, though, is the people. Especially Bess and Marie. They love each other fiercely. They drive each other crazy. And Cassie plays referee.

And no matter where in the world they happen to be, Bess will do absolutely anything for her mom.

Even solve a murder in Paris.

Passport to Murder will be the first adventure in my new Travel Blogger Cozy Mystery Series, and I can’t wait to take you along. Better start packing.