Harper Kincaid Delights Cozy Mystery Readers with 'A Midsummer Night's Scheme'

In A Midsummer Night’s Scheme, Harper Kincaid entertains readers with a second novel in her Bookbinding Mystery series. Set in Vienna, Virginia, this story is the sequel to To Kill a Mocking Girl, and follows Quinn Caine and her sidekicks on another mystery, but this time around the killer is targeting womanizers, including former resident turned Broadway star, Chad Frivole, and Quinn’s brother, Bash. “So the first book had been a revenge fantasy about the mean girl in town getting murdered. This time, it’s the lothario or the lotharios in town who are the subject of someone’s ire… So Chad Frivole is, sort of, the local kid who made good. He becomes a big Broadway star. He comes back to my town of Vienna, Virginia, and he wants to open a theater here. He wants to do something for his legacy and while some people, of course, are thrilled that he’s back, all the scorned women from his past are really unpleased and, in fact, sort of three main characters, three… suspects modeled after Macbeth’s witches… they are all giving their threats and have different motivations and Quinn Caine, who is one of the heroines, her cousin, who’s Sister Daria, the nun, they go back and forth between the chapters with their point of view… So Chad gets murdered on the page, which is something that cozies don’t do but it’s through a series of snakebites. So it is a stabbing… but then the killer is coming after Quinn’s brother, even [though] he’s engaged recently, he’s settled down but he had a checkered past with women in his past, so someone is obviously targeting the playboys… the players of the town.”

For those unfamiliar with cozy mysteries, the genre of A Midsummer’s Night Scheme, Kincaid explains, “So cozy mysteries, the… Cliffs Notes or SparkNotes version, is an amateur heroine sleuth, although it can be a hero, an amateur sleuth who has wonderful, almost cottage core hobbies, solves mysteries in their spare time and there’s no sex on the page, no violence, no profanity.” While some cozies are very sweet and charming, others, like her books, push the boundaries… “we’re still abiding by the rules, but we’re going as close to the edge as we possibly can. We just want to play with it a little bit, but it’s still cozies.” Although Kincaid initially started out as a romance author, she eventually shifted to writing mysteries. Luckily for her, she found a supportive publisher in Crooked Lane, a publishing house that specializes in suspense, mystery, and thrillers. “Crooked Lane, within the cozy mystery community, is very well-respected. I mean, there’s a few houses who are known for taking care of them and so this is one of them…. They were willing to take a chance on me because I was not a mystery writer, I was a romance writer… and we’ve been growing together and they fostered my career, which I really appreciate and they loved it from the start… that’s how I found them and they found me and it’s been a really happy marriage so far.”