Motorhome Murder Mysteries
The Motorhome Murder Mysteries is my series of humorous whodunits set in RV parks and campgrounds across the country. They’re not like “cozy” mysteries you may have read: no knitting circles, no grandmotherly sleuths, no recipes. Rather, our protagonists, Franklin and Wendy Becker, an odd couple if ever there was one, travel across country supposedly to find themselves but stumble upon corpses instead.
Originally written as short stories, the Motorhome Murder Mysteries grew into novellas like mold in a refrigerator: Cooked Goose (November 2020), Spacemen Don’t Camp (June 2021), Anger Management (May 2022), The South Dakota Beech Diet (April 2023), Grizelda Gives Up the Ghost (February 2025), and Hair of the Mad Dog (May 2026).
Here are synopses of the six novellas in the series:
Family is everything. Unless they kill you. Franklin and Wendy Becker’s motorhome trip across the country skids off course when they discover Charlie Gosling’s body in a campground. Charlie’s dysfunctional family offers no shortage of suspects: the man’s ex-wife, two disgruntled brothers-in-law, a ditzy sister-in-law, and more. When the county sheriff leaves for an emergency and the Elk Rump, Idaho, townspeople fail to help, the Beckers speed ahead with their investigation. But someone is trying to stop them dead in their tire-tracks.
Prologue: The barbecue bounced like a rowboat on rough seas as the truck hauling it rounded the last turn into the campground. This particular grill housed not a porcine dinner but Lucy’s ex-husband, Charles Gosling. He was neither seasoned nor glazed but was most assuredly dead.
An RV trip that’s out of this world! In a remote camp outside Roswell, New Mexico, bumbling, big-hearted Franklin Becker sets out alone at midnight to find an alien spacecraft. When he comes up missing, and his ufologist friend is found dead, Franklin’s wife, Wendy, battles other UFO-seeking campers to save her husband. At least the spaceman is friendly—at first.
Prologue: Stars filled the night sky above the old CCC camp, twinkling and winking at dark tents and silent motorhomes below. Few campers lasted long in the desolate patch of no-man’s-land east of Roswell, New Mexico, but those who did stay viewed starlit nights they would remember for the rest of their lives. For camper Melvin Potkin, that memory lasted only a few hours, until he drew his last breath under eerie blue light.
Prologue: Bert Crappert thought he knew everything about bird watching. Migration patterns of woodland ducks and hummingbirds. Mating calls of robins and the danger cries of thrush. Even the average length, to the nearest millimeter, of seagull bills. It was thus fitting that Bert’s last sighting was red-breasted sapsucker droppings, landing on his nose as the poison took effect.
Prologue: Sheila Astor Gould loved to mingle with the rich and famous. She savored tweets of their lavish lifestyles and drooled over posts of their Botox-filled faces. Rarely did she deign to spend time with the little people, everyone else on the planet. But when she learned a movie star had rented a remote cabin from the leader of the Black Hills Outdoor Club, Sheila wheedled an invitation from the club to travel to his cabin. It was a fatal mistake she, unfortunately, would not live to regret.
Not a ghost of a chance. The Iowa Historical Bike Tours promised a night in a haunted house. At first, Franklin Becker is thrilled, but after miles of hard pedaling, he regrets sharing the spooky old mansion with malevolent spirits. When a fellow bicyclist is found dead and another vanishes, his wife Wendy and their vintage motorhome Grizelda offer the only hope to escape alive. Even Estancia the cat thinks they haven’t a ghost of a chance.
Prologue: Roger Bolden was an accomplished man. He’d transitioned from a successful attorney to a thriving sommelier, and though he was a spiritual man, he didn’t believe in ghosts. That is until a wolfish apparition attacked the Iowa Historical Bike Tours, hell-bent on revenge. When Roger vanishes, Wendy and Franklin Becker suspect the former lawyer has taken supernatural law into his own hands.
The dogs have had their day. Basset hound Mad Dog has found the perfect home: the Gloucester Winery in Bardsville, Oregon, home of Shakespearean puns and the truly awful community theater play, The War of the Rosés. His humans, Wendy and Franklin Becker, contemplate a joint vineyard-pet rescue with the winery owner and join the play’s amateur cast. But when the vintner’s ex-wife dies in a vat of pinot noir, the Beckers’ perfect plan sours. Mad Dog and the town’s feral canines know the truth, but will they talk?
Prologue: Liz Grayson was easy to dislike and even easier to detest. Greedy, gaudy, and—according to her first husband, winery-owner Ed Bolden—mercilessly cruel. Folks in Bardsville, Oregon, held little hope for Liz’s current marriage to former vintner George Duke, despite his apparent blindness to her many flaws. One group never wavered in their hatred of the woman: the feral dogs from the puppy mill where Liz once worked. The bloody paw prints near Liz’s lifeless corpse announced that the dogs had had their day.