Review: Fiddling with Murder (A Hattie and Moose Cozy Mystery #2) by Greta Sinclair

Fiddling with Murder

A Hattie and Moose Cozy Mystery #2

by Greta Sinclair

Published: August 29, 2025

Genre: Cozy Mystery, Cozy Animal Mystery

Blurb:

Music? It can be absolute murder

PI Hattie Leiper expected Nashville to be filled with bluegrass jams, honky-tonks, and hot chicken.

But when a legendary fiddle belonging to a vanished music star turns up on Hattie’s doorstep, along with a torn piece of sheet music carrying a chilling message, her weekend plans end on a sour note.

Hattie, along with her grumpy Chow Chow Moose, clever cat Cecil, and bestie are pulled into a case as tangled as an old banjo string.

As whispers of stolen songs and a mysterious fire echo through Music Row, secrets begin to surface, linking a reclusive producer, a curious fiddle student, and a former rival musician.

And when a disarmingly charming newcomer, Detective Bo Beckett, teams up with Hattie, the investigation starts to heat up, in more ways than one.

Hattie better hurry-up because someone is willing to kill to keep this song buried.

If Hattie can’t hit the right note, Nashville might lose its history forever.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Wow! I loved this book even more than the others! This was such a heartfelt story, I just couldn't put it down. A great story from a great author!

Read it until the end, you will not be disappointed!” -Pam Freeman

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “I just LOVE this new series! Another unputdownable cozy from Greta Sinclair!” -J. Poteet

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “You just have to keep reading this story as it hooks you into the mystery immediately! Who knew the music industry could be so cut throat and evil?” -Becky H

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “This is an exciting, hard to put down mystery addition to the series with great characters and poetic writing.” -Allison Polliso

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My Review:

Fiddling with Murder is the second book and a great continuation of Greta Sinclair’s new series, A Hattie and Moose Cozy Mystery. Fiddling with Murder starts out with a wonderful beginning that is sure to capture your attention from the first sentence.

A world-famous fiddle turns up on Hattie’s porch in the middle of the night. The initials of a girl who went missing five years ago were on the fiddle. Hattie, along with her grumpy Chow Chow Moose, clever cat Cecil, and best friend, Gracie, investigates the mysterious disappearance of the music star.

Their investigation uncovers many suspects who had their own reasons for wanting to silence the music star. What happened to Charity five years ago? Is she still alive? Did she go into hiding?

I am loving this new series and can’t wait to read more about Hattie, Moose, Cecil, and Mini Pearl. And what about Hattie and Detective Bo Beckett? Are things beginning to heat up there?

I am enjoying this new series so much that I highly recommend grabbing a copy of book one, Murder, Music & Mischief, and book two, Fiddling with Murder today and get to know Hattie, Moose, Cecil, and Mini Pearl, oh and let's not forget about the handsome Detective Bo Beckett as they solve mysterious crimes.  

Check out all the books in the Hattie and Moose Cozy Mystery Series I’ve read.

Murder, Music & Mischief #1

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Amazon

Fiddling with Murder #2

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Book Tour + #Giveaway: Dance of Demons by E. Gary Gygax @RABTBookTours

 

Poison and Opium, book 1

Dark Fantasy/LGBTQ+

Date Published: 03-26-2025

Publisher: Shadow Spark Publishing

Content Warnings: Depictions of slavery, Depictions of child abuse, Blood, Death, Animal death, Self-harm, Drinking, Smoking, Drug use

Slave. Soldier. Spy.

Daisuke’s heart has always wandered far from home, hoping for a life beyond what he’d have as a Northern Nomad raised in slavery. One evening, when he learns the Giahatio’s imperial military has arrived in search of recruits, he seizes his chance to flee Okara’s plantations and start anew. However, becoming a footsoldier isn’t the easy escape he expected, and he soon finds himself struggling for a place within the infantry and Giahatian society.

Obito knows he should be grateful for the opportunity to serve as one of the Empire’s elite intelligence operatives, the onmitsu—it’s one of few he’ll ever have in life, and the highest possible honor for a nobleman’s youngest son. But with demons of anger and shame haunting him as he tries to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of a scandal, any pride to take in rank or family name is entirely hollow.

When an act of mercy is born from a senseless murder, the already unlikely friendship between Daisuke and Obito takes an unexpected turn. Not only are they now partnered together as onmitsu, but dark politics are on the rise, leading them toward an ancient, furious magic.

 

Interview with E. Gary Gygax

What is your favorite part of the book?

This is a hard one, mainly because I love working with these characters so much. It’s either the first mission Daisuke and Obito go on together, or the “fight” they get into over Daisuke not getting out of bed on time for a different mission. Their moments of emotional honesty with each other are also pretty high up there.

Does your book have a lesson? Moral?

Hopefully, the characters show readers that it’s possible to reach beyond what you’ve been told you can be, and that there’s more than one way to fight power and authority you don’t agree with. Acceptance and empathy are also big themes.

Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?

I try really hard to pull characters from my imagination and avoid basing them off real people—it makes me uncomfortable. But, I can’t pretend I haven’t done it subconsciously, either, and I usually don’t realize it until after they’re on the page and more developed. It just kind of hits me like, “Oh, this is actually X-person. Oops.”

Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?

For this series, as much as I love Daisuke and Obito, it might be Junpei. He doesn’t have a great start in this first book, but he grows up a lot in the next ones. Overall, it might be Kohaku, who doesn’t appear in this series. He’s a sweet boy under his grumpy exterior, and I feel like I connect with him the most.

What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?

I have a few that I wouldn’t get along with. The boys’ parents, the Emperor, Giichi, and Lord Hideo would all be on my list. As much as I love Lady Shadow, I’m actually not sure how well we’d get along, either.

What would the main character in your book have to say about you?

I’m not sure, but given what they’ve been through, I don’t think it’d be anything nice. Hopefully Daisuke would just side-eye me and Obito would roll his eyes whenever they saw me.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

This series directly connects to another series I’ve already written, and some elements from here will also come into play in a future series I have planned. But! Mostly, I hope the books stand on their own.

About the Author

Alyssa Lauseng is a married mom of two warrior princesses who lives in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula. So much inspiration is drawn from a life-long love of martial arts, the pointy objects she's obsessed with, and the U.P.'s abundant nature.

She can be found on BlueSky and Instagram @5FeetofRedFury, ready to nerd out.

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Book Tour + #Giveaway: Your Aging Body by Bruce Carlson @RABTBookTours

and how to care for it

Nonfiction / Aging / Self-Help

Date Published: 06-12-2025

Publisher: The Woodtick Press

Written in understandable language, this book describes the ways in which our body changes with age and outlines some practical ways to counter many of these changes. It begins by discussing the aging process in general terms and why some people seem much younger than others of the same chronological age. After a presentation of general characteristics of the aging body, subsequent chapters focus on what lies behind the aging of specific parts of the body and how the reader can counteract or slow down the aging process through lifestyle changes. The text illustrates how some seemingly quite different aging changes, for example skin wrinkles and high blood pressure, are due to very similar underlying mechanisms. Although not focusing on disease, the book deals with a number of conditions, e.g., hypertension, arthritis, Type II diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, which affect many older adults. A concluding chapter pulls together many of the details presented earlier in the book and offers some practical advice for navigating the aging process.

As both a professional anatomist and a gerontologist, the author is well qualified to write a book on the aging body. Forty years as a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and also Director of the Institute of Gerontology. For several decades he conducted research on the aging of muscle. He is a past-president of the American Association of Anatomists and of the Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Neurobiology Chairpersons.

Interview coming soon

About the Author

 

 Bruce Carlson has had a long and varied career in a number of fields. As an undergraduate student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, he majored in biology, languages and chemistry. As a prelude to becoming a fish biologist, he worked for the Minnesota Conservation Department (now DNR) as an aquatic biologist during summers except for one when he conducted research at the University of Georgia Marine Laboratory on Sapelo Island, Georgia. He entered a program in ichthyology at Cornell University, but became fascinated with the phenomenon of regeneration. After receiving an MS from Cornell, he entered the MD-PhD program at the University of Minnesota where he conducted research on limb regeneration in salamanders.

In 1966 he joined the faculty of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Michigan Medical School and became Chairman of the Department and later, Director of the Institute of Gerontology. He taught microscopic anatomy and human embryology and received several major awards for his teaching. His research on regeneration, embryology and muscle biology led him to live for extended periods in five countries – The USSR, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand. A prolific writer, he has written over 200 articles and chapters in scientific publications, has edited 15 symposium articles and translations, and he has written twenty books on a variety of topics.

Bruce is an avid fisherman, who is on the water well over 100 days per year, either night-fishing for walleyes or fly fishing for smallmouth bass in northern Minnesota. He has also taken many trips to New Zealand, his favorite country, to fish for trout in a remote lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. For many years he wrote articles for several national fishing magazines. The main theme was that the more you understand the biology of the fish you are trying tocatch, the better will be your results.

Since retirement in 2006, Bruce has reverted to his scientific childhood and has again taken up work on fish and lake biology. In addition to weekly collections of data about the lake by his cabin, he has directed a ten-year study on the growth of northern pike on a nearby lake and has spent hundreds of hours taking underwater videos in northern lakes. This activity has led to his writing two popular books on lake biology and one on aquatic invasive species.

In addition to his outdoor work, Bruce has maintained an active professional writing schedule, with seven editions of his book “Human Embryology and Developmental Biology” and other books on regeneration, the human body and muscle biology. His work in the area of embryology has led him into expert witness work in that area and writing a new book on the abortion controversy – “The Abortion Controversy – An Embryologist’s Perspective.” His background in anatomy and the biology of aging has him thinking about writing a new book on understanding the aging body.

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Audiobook Tour: Elk Love: A Montana Memoir by Lynne Spriggs O'Connor @RABTBookTours

Memoir

Date Published: 06-30-2025

Publisher: She Writes Press

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her.

Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she decided to leave city life behind. But her dream of being more connected to nature in the American West comes alive when she meets Harrison, a handsome rancher thirteen years her senior. Wary but curious, with her dog Willow by her side, she leans into the seasonal rhythms of Harrison’s hidden valley and opens her heart to a wild language that moves beyond words. In a modern world where listening is rare, Elk Love explores an intimate place where loneliness gives way to wonder, where the natural world speaks of what matters most.

 

About the Author

Before moving to the rural West at age forty-two, Lynne Spriggs O'Connor curated exhibitions of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum in Atlanta. She spent ten summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian reservation while pursuing fieldwork for her PhD in Native American Art History at Columbia University. She also worked in the film industry as Production Coordinator for Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme on the iconic Swimming to Cambodia. After landing in Montana, she curated Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the Charlie Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. Elk Love is her first memoir. For the past fifteen years, she and her husband have lived on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies, where her life centers on writing, animals, and family.

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Book Blitz: Diary of a Cult Girl by Crystal Ball @CrystalBall_IGW @RABTBookTours

Cult, Memoir, Diaries

Date Published: June 26, 2025

 

A Historical Account of Fear, Control, and Escape

“When you’re raised to fear the world, you never question the cage.”

Before she ever knew what freedom felt like, she documented captivity.

Told through the actual journals and letters written while trapped inside one of America’s most quietly dangerous religious cults, Diary of a Cult Girl is a chilling first-person account of life under the rule of Bill Gothard’s teachings—what many now recognize from the “Shiny Happy People” movement.

Raised in rural Alabama, in poverty, with church at home, school at home, and six younger siblings to raise, Crystal Ball’s childhood was shaped not by freedom, but by an addiction to control. Not drugs. Not alcohol. But military-grade submission, inside a cult franchise that gave abusers unchecked authority in God’s name—a system that weaponized fear, shame, and guilt like narcotics to keep women and children quiet and compliant.

In the spirit of The Diary of Anne Frank, this is not just a memoir—it’s evidence. A record of indoctrination. Of blind obedience mistaken for faith. Of a young girl awakening to the unbearable cost of survival.

Alongside her firsthand accounts, Crystal introduces the 3P Framework—Personal Psychological Perceptions—to examine how control systems form in the mind and how they keep victims psychologically trapped, even long after physical escape.

This is the tragic story of a beautiful mind locked in the chains of repression, desperately longing for a better life she was told didn’t exist—until she found the courage to leave it all in the red clay Alabama dust that almost choked her.

 

About the Author

Crystal Ball went from the bottom 5% of poverty, raised in an extreme religious cult, to the top 5% of earners as a self-made entrepreneur. Her journey spans the gritty aisles of the convenience store industry to high-level real estate deals, with stops in journalism, public speaking, and personal reinvention along the way.

Crystal writes with brutal honesty and piercing insight, drawing from years of painful isolation, spiritual control, and emotional suppression. Her work offers a raw, eye-opening perspective on the lasting damage of authoritarian belief systems—especially in a world where right-wing extremism is on the rise.

Now living her dream life in Panama City Beach, Florida, Crystal is the proud mom of two incredible sons. Her mission is to spark courageous conversations, dismantle shame, and champion the power of self-liberation—one story at a time.

 

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Teaser: Changing Woman’s Hair by Jan D. Payne @PayneRabbit @RABTBookTours

 

Marin Sinclair, Book 2

Suspense Thriller

Date Published: 09/15/2025

Publisher: RabbitHole LLC

When Marin Sinclair discovers teenager Garret Washburn in danger from a deadly conspiracy involving bootlegged alcohol, wolf-witches, an election campaign, murder, and an unknown bomber, she looks to Navajo Nation Police Sergeant Justin Blue Eyes and Federal Agent Cullen MacPherson to help protect Vangie Tso's son from the dark forces at play.

Excerpt

—“It’s likely the same guys,” Franklin whispered. “You need to go for help. Get word to Sergeant Blue Eyes.”

“I can’t go without you,” she said, and Franklin took her hand and pressed it against his side. When she pulled her hand away, it was wet and sticky.

“You’re bleeding!” she said, and Franklin’s nod was dimly visible in the darkness lit only by the fires. “I’ll find something to help,” Marin said, and crawled through the hogan’s entrance, searching by feel until she found several pieces of soft clothing or bedding.

“Hold this over the wound and press,” she said, making a thick pad. She tied the pad around Franklin using a length of bale twine, and he gasped, then sat taking deep breaths.

“Sorry, we need to get the bleeding stopped,” she whispered.

Franklin took another breath and gave a low whistle. A horse broke away from the bunched group and came close to the rails, snorting softly.

“Here is your friend, Otekah,” Franklin said and ducked into the corral. “You must take her and go.”

“Go where?”

Franklin didn’t answer. He took a rope from a corral post and ran the rope behind Otekah’s ears, made a quick turn around the mare’s muzzle, and looped a knot into the side of the make-shift halter. He pushed the end of the rope into Marin’s hands.

“No,” she said. “I can’t leave you. You’re hurt.”

“They’ll soon come looking,” Franklin said. “Trust Otekah to find the way. She’ll be going home.”

“I can’t find my way in the dark!” Marin said.

“She knows the way. There is only one gate to open; our home is near the canyon’s end. You will be able to climb out.”

“No … ” Marin said.

“Climb up to the rim road. Bring back help.”

“Franklin, I can’t climb the canyon wall!”

“There are handholds to guide you,” he said, and he pushed something cold, round, and metallic into her hands … a flashlight.

“I shot one of those Indian kids,” said a man’s deep voice and she and Franklin froze, sinking deeper into the hogan’s shadows. “He ran over here.”

“Lay off. I’m not about to get trampled trying to find him,” a second man answered.

“He’s in here, I know it.”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s got nowhere to run with this hut built up against the canyon wall.”

“You can either come out or you can bleed to death!” the first man shouted, and there was a sudden blast of gunfire.

Marin yelped, and Otekah reared, yanking the rope from her hands and whirling away. Yuma, his gray coat barely visible, whistled shrilly and kicked against the corral poles until the saplings shuddered.

“I said lay off, you idiot! A pole fence won’t hold half-ton horses! You’ll get us trampled! You don’t even know if the kid’s in there.”

The first man raised his voice. “You hear that, Injun boy? We’re gonna start shooting your horses if you don’t come out!”

“Stow it, Jack! You start shooting and these horses will go crazy. That kid’s not going anywhere. We need to get back to the prisoners.”

“Prisoners,” Marin breathed when the men walked away. “We have to stay and help them.”

“No. You must go, shadi,” Franklin said, making a soft clucking noise until Otekah once more came close, tossing her head as the other horses restlessly circled the corral, stamping and blowing. “My beauty,” Franklin murmured, picking up the trailing rope and looping it around Otekah’s neck.

“This is a bad idea,” Marin said, but she climbed between the corral poles to lean against Otekah’s warmth. The horses were bunched together, pressing hard against the gate poles, anxious to escape, eager to run. Still …

“I’d never forgive myself if you and the others … ”

“You must bring help, tell the Sergeant what has happened.”

There was no one else to go.

When Franklin again pushed the flashlight into her hands, she took it and shoved it into her waistband, then caught Otekah’s mane and rolled onto the mare’s back, catching up the rope in one hand.

Franklin murmured something that sounded like a prayer and slid a pole from the top of the gate. Carefully he lowered one end to the ground, then reached for the next pole and did the same. Even with only two poles down, the horses began to push into the gap, Otekah with them, and Marin clutched the halter rope breathing in the familiar scent of horse—dust, dried grass, musky sweat.

“I’m not sure I can guide her.”

“Just stay on,” Franklin returned.

Marin wrapped the rope tight around her hand and twisted both hands into Otekah’s mane, aware of a familiar rush of excitement, that stomach-clenching tension when Dandy’s muscles had bunched beneath her the second before the rodeo arena gate flew open and they shot forward. She’d done this a hundred times or more, and she bent low to Otekah’s neck, gathering focus.

“Ready … ” Franklin whispered, and he eased the last pole to the ground.

“Franklin, I … ” Marin began, but Franklin stepped back, gave a shrill, yipping yell, and slapped Otekah across the rump, waving his hat as the horses surged forward.—

 

 

About the Author

Drawing from her own life story in the Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation, author Jan D. Payne offers readers a journey into the heart of the American Southwest in a modern-day romantic suspense series. Writing characters who navigate diverse cultural influences to explore the lines between the seen and the unseen, the modern and the traditional, the present and the past—she creates a world where the impossible becomes possible, and mythical legends come to life.

Jan is a member of Western Writers of America and Women Writing the West. She and her husband live in northern Minnesota with their three big dogs—Kaibab, Rudi, and Orrin. Visit her website at: jandpayne.com

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