Peg Cochran — Mysteries to Cozy Up With

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted to introduce Peg Cochran, author of Berried Secrets, the first in The Cranberry Cove series which will be published on August 4th. 

Congratulations on the new book and series, Peg, and welcome!

When Monica Albertson comes to Cranberry Cove—a charming town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan—to help her half-brother Jeff on his cranberry farm, the last thing she expects to harvest is a dead body.

It seems that Sam Culbert, who ran the farm while Jeff was deployed overseas, had some juicy secrets that soon prove fatal, and Jeff is ripe for the picking as a prime suspect. Forming an uneasy alliance with her high-maintenance stepmother, Monica has her hands full trying to save the farm while searching for a killer. Culbert made plenty of enemies in the quaint small town…but which one was desperate enough to kill?

PEG COCHRAN: One of the fun things about being a writer is you get to do research on many varied topics.  And not just about police procedure and when does rigor mortis set it in and what’s the difference between a pistol and a revolver.  For my Sweet Nothings Lingerie series, I got to research vintage lingerie (and bullet bras!)  For my Gourmet De-Lite series it was healthy but delicious food (I was always hungry.)     

With my latest release, Berried Secrets, first in my Cranberry Cove series, I’m all about cranberries. Cranberries are one of three fruits native to North America (the Concord grape and blueberries are the other two) and are packed with vitamin C.  Whalers carried them on their ships to prevent scurvy.

Cranberries don’t grow in water as you might think if you pass a cranberry bog during harvest.  They grow on vines in sandy soil and most are “wet harvested.”  The bogs are flooded, the cranberries are beaten from the vine, and thanks to air pockets in the berries, they float.  Farmers use a boom to corral the berries toward a pipe which sucks them into a truck.

Cranberries are susceptible to frost and farmers combat that by flooding the bogs (which can be as much as 20 degrees colder than the surrounding area) when there’s a danger of frost.  The water freezing produces enough heat to protect the berries.

A man named Pegleg John discovered that good cranberries bounce. Folklore has it that he kept his berries on a loft in his barn, and unable to descend the stairs while carrying a basket due to his “pegleg” he poured the berries down the stairs.  The good berries bounced to the ground while the rotten berries stayed on the stairs.  This discovery gave rise to various sorting machines which are still used today to put the berries to the “bounce test.”

Most cranberries harvested go to Ocean Spray which is actually a cooperative owned by the farmers themselves.  Wisconsin produces the most cranberries with Massachusetts coming in second and my home state of New Jersey coming in third.  Cranberries are also grown in Oregon and Washington.

I was able to visit a cranberry bog in Michigan where I watched the harvest.  It’s a beautiful sight—the brilliant red cranberries bobbing in the water.  Their color can range from almost white to pink to the deepest red. 

The farmer was very patient, explaining everything to me and answering all my questions.  Except one.  When I asked him what he’d do if a body floated up in the bog, he didn’t know what to say!

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Um, call 911, right? Kidding... 

See the things mystery authors do for us? Learn about guns! Try on bullet bras! Visit cranberry bogs! 

Peg, Reds and lovely readers, how far would you go to research a mystery? What wouldn't you do? Tell us in the comments!

Mystery writing lets Peg indulge her curiosity under the guise of “work.”  As a kid, she read the entire set of children’s encyclopedias her parents gave her has been known to read the dictionary.  She put pen to paper at age seven when she wrote plays and forced her cousins to perform them at Christmas dinner.   She switched to mysteries when she discovered the perfect hiding place for a body down the street from her house.

A former Jersey girl, Peg now resides in Michigan with her husband and Westhighland white terrier, Reg.  She is the author of the Sweet Nothings Lingerie series (written as Meg London), the Gourmet De-Lite series, the Lucille series and now the Cranberry Cove series.  Her newest series, the Farmer’s Daughter, debuts in 2016.

Visit Peg's web site at pegcochran.com.