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Maxie Mouse Mystery #1-3
Nosy in Nebraska
Murder is no cat-and-mouse game in rural Melnik, Nebraska
Maxie, the World's Largest (Stuffed) Field Mouse, must come through time and again to thwart the criminals in his peaceful--albeit mouse-obsessed--hometown.
- Carrie Evans, hates mice and loves the big city. So why is she living in her dinky hometown in a mouse-infested house where a dead body lurks in the pantry? Is it a matter Of Mice...and Murder--or the allure of a certain carpenter who's helping her trap her rodents and solve the murder mystery?
- Bonnie Simpson is attacked while at work in the Melnik Historical Society Museum. Her assailant also tops her suspect list in the murder of Sven Gunderson...if only the stranger weren't so charming. Besides, lots of people had a motive to kill Gunderson--including Bonnie. It's a matter of Pride and Pestilence when the true owner of Maxie, the World's Largest Field Mouse, decides he wants his mouse back. In Melnik, that means war!
- Tyler Simpson is opening a new law office, and he thinks he's home to stay in Melnik--until a body falls out of a cupboard and Tyler is forced to defend the town's nemesis as her court-appointed attorney. The Mice Man Cometh again as Maxie Mouse saves the day one more time.
Maxie, the World's Largest (Stuffed) Field Mouse, must come through time and again to thwart the criminals in his peaceful--albeit mouse-obsessed--hometown.
- Carrie Evans, hates mice and loves the big city. So why is she living in her dinky hometown in a mouse-infested house where a dead body lurks in the pantry? Is it a matter Of Mice...and Murder--or the allure of a certain carpenter who's helping her trap her rodents and solve the murder mystery?
- Bonnie Simpson is attacked while at work in the Melnik Historical Society Museum. Her assailant also tops her suspect list in the murder of Sven Gunderson...if only the stranger weren't so charming. Besides, lots of people had a motive to kill Gunderson--including Bonnie. It's a matter of Pride and Pestilence when the true owner of Maxie, the World's Largest Field Mouse, decides he wants his mouse back. In Melnik, that means war!
- Tyler Simpson is opening a new law office, and he thinks he's home to stay in Melnik--until a body falls out of a cupboard and Tyler is forced to defend the town's nemesis as her court-appointed attorney. The Mice Man Cometh again as Maxie Mouse saves the day one more time.
474 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
Mary Connealy
118 books2,491 followersMary Connealy writes romantic comedy with cowboys always with a strong suspense thread. She is a two time Carol Award winner, and a Rita, Christy and Inspirational Reader's Choice finalist.
She is the bestselling author of 65 books and novellas.
Her most recent three book series are: Braced for Love, A Man with a Past and Love on the Range for Bethany House Publishing. She’s also written four other series for Barbour Publishing and many novellas and several stand-alone books for multiple publishers.
Mary will be a published author for ten years in 2017 with nearly a million books in print. She has a degree in broadcast communications with an emphasis in journalism and has worked at her local newspaper.
Find Mary online at:
Seekerville
Petticoats & Pistols
My Website
She is the bestselling author of 65 books and novellas.
Her most recent three book series are: Braced for Love, A Man with a Past and Love on the Range for Bethany House Publishing. She’s also written four other series for Barbour Publishing and many novellas and several stand-alone books for multiple publishers.
Mary will be a published author for ten years in 2017 with nearly a million books in print. She has a degree in broadcast communications with an emphasis in journalism and has worked at her local newspaper.
Find Mary online at:
Seekerville
Petticoats & Pistols
My Website
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 28, 2016
Three novellas make up this book. Each could stand-alone, but they're even better together. Only Mary Connealy can mix romance, murder, and comedy in a book where a town's dead mouse mascot plays center stage. This is a perfect summer read: fast, lighthearted, and literally laugh-out-loud funny.
July 15, 2009
I LOVED the first story the best. it was VERY FUNNY!!!!! the second story was nifty and the last was pretty funny also....very interesting books to read and will have young people laughing for awhile... in one of the stories the girl in it didnt know the 911 number and also a girl in one of the stories was TERRIFIED of mice and always jumped into other peoples arms...didnt matter whose...as long as she got away from the mice... overall it was a FABULUS book!!!!
February 8, 2019
I don’t really know what to say about this book, it was odd and just seemed stupid. It is actually 3 books and while one was better it was nothing you would recommend.
February 4, 2022
In short, this book is a keeper.
A collection of three books ("Of Mice ... and Murder," "Pride and Pestilence," and "The Mice Man Cometh"), "Nosy in Nebraska" is a hilarious romantic mystery trilogy which keeps me coming back again and again ... and again and again and again.
Each book is fairly short, but that doesn't mean it skimps on story. The heroes and heroines of all three are unique while nicely complimenting each other in the course of the overall story.
Melnik, Nebraska has one claim to fame: It's the home to Maxie, the World's Largest Field Mouse. This not-so-little mouse doesn't let being dead and stuffed stop him, however. Thanks to the inhabitants of this quirky town (some more than others), he gets around - and solves a few murders along the way.
There are certain themes that carry through all three stories. Most notable (and hilarious) of these are that (despite appearances) there IS no crime in Melnik and, if you do happen to get killed, you've done something to deserve it. With the help of the sheriff of Melnik, Junior Hammerstad, the hero and heroine of each individual story solves the murder of the dead person to whom they inevitably find.
In "Of Mice ... and Murder," Carrie just wants to get out of Melnik. But thanks to her Great-Grandma Bea, who at 103 years old just kicked the bucket and left Carrie her house, that doesn't seem to have any hope of coming true. Since she failed to be a great journalist in Omaha and has had to move back home, she intends to clean up her relative's house - and with the help of Nick, the handsome man who's restoring the old wreck, finds the dead body of Wilkie Melnik (who seemed to have fathered half the town) in her kitchen closet. In a series of increasingly hilarious events, several people claim to have murdered the man. First Shayla, his daughter, with a beer can full of antifreeze (which Wilkie had intended to use on Shayla's cat); then deputy Hal (courtesy of a frying pan); and of course the turban-and-caftan-wearing Tallulah Pritchard, the head of the Melnik Historical Society, who shot him (after he was already dead). With poison, a head wound, a bullet hole, and having discovered to be smothered, which method actually killed him? And with the vast majority of the town being suspects (including Wilkie's wife Rosie and his pregnant girlfriend Donette), can Carrie and Nick find out exactly who - and why the dirty deed was done?
Next up is "Pride and Pestilence." Librarian Bonnie is in her mid-thirties and starting to feel very alone. With her parents dead and her younger brothers moved out (two to college and one married with kids of his own), she's starting to wonder if it's possible she'll be alone for the rest of her life. But thanks to a midnight thunderstorm, Dora Clemson's 1975 rust-bucket Chrysler New Yorker, and a handsome stranger, her life's about to get very interesting. When lightning strikes and Dora crashes her car into the museum, Bonnie's life is saved by the handsome Joe Manning, a new man in town who came to meet his father, miserly Sven Gunderson, for the first time. Unfortunately for him, his father is shortly found dead in a (formerly) locked closet in the museum. With suspects for the murder including Clara, the Crazy Pie Lady of Melnik (who sells her pies [such as cherry-marble, d-Con a la mode, and pork chop and minty shaving cream] on every Monday to the residents of the town, who buy them to support her but never consume them) and Kevin Melnik, son of the ill-fated Wilkie (murder victim of the book before), it's up to Bonnie and Joe (plus a little help from Cousin Junior the sheriff and, of course, Maxie the Mouse) to solve this crime before the murderer strikes again - this time a little closer to home.
Lastly is "The Mice Man Cometh." Tyler Simpson, torn between missing his control-freak, small-town-hating wife Liza (dead from a road rage car accident during "Pride and Pestilence"), moves back to his hometown of Melnik from Omaha. While cleaning and preparing his new law office to open for business, Tyler and his two sons meet their intriguing next-door neighbor, a British anthropologist named Dr. Maddie Stuart. A real-life Snow White, this clumsy Brit has come to Melnik to write a thesis she's sure will catapult her career into fame (more like infamy!). The subject? The residents of a small American town who seem to worship an obese mouse named Maxie. But when a dead body is discovered in Tyler's law office clutching Maddie's locket, implicating her in the crime, she realizes there's a lot more to this quaint little village than meets the eye. Tyler, who is under the impression Maddie finds him sad, angry, and grieving, is appointed as her lawyer and is forced to help her as she bops in and out of jail. Add in some new members of the fast-growing community (including a vampire-like mortician/barbershop quartet member named Dolph, a hippie husband-and-wife antique dealer team, and a plumber named Jamie Bobby), this crazy town might have just found itself in the middle of a mess from which it can never recover. But Maddie and Tyler, thanks to Maxie and the rest of the town, are about to discover that despite the mice and the murders and the suspicion, Melnik just might be the best place in the world to live.
These three books are extremely funny, very well-written, and filled with engaging characters. Small-town America comes to life in a tongue-and-cheek way, poking fun at the cliché things which seem to define small towns while bringing to the fore the best things about living in one - the fact that everyone in town loves and supports you, and you've always got someone there to help you through the good times and the bad.
A great book for a rainy day by the fire or a sunny day at the beach.
A collection of three books ("Of Mice ... and Murder," "Pride and Pestilence," and "The Mice Man Cometh"), "Nosy in Nebraska" is a hilarious romantic mystery trilogy which keeps me coming back again and again ... and again and again and again.
Each book is fairly short, but that doesn't mean it skimps on story. The heroes and heroines of all three are unique while nicely complimenting each other in the course of the overall story.
Melnik, Nebraska has one claim to fame: It's the home to Maxie, the World's Largest Field Mouse. This not-so-little mouse doesn't let being dead and stuffed stop him, however. Thanks to the inhabitants of this quirky town (some more than others), he gets around - and solves a few murders along the way.
There are certain themes that carry through all three stories. Most notable (and hilarious) of these are that (despite appearances) there IS no crime in Melnik and, if you do happen to get killed, you've done something to deserve it. With the help of the sheriff of Melnik, Junior Hammerstad, the hero and heroine of each individual story solves the murder of the dead person to whom they inevitably find.
In "Of Mice ... and Murder," Carrie just wants to get out of Melnik. But thanks to her Great-Grandma Bea, who at 103 years old just kicked the bucket and left Carrie her house, that doesn't seem to have any hope of coming true. Since she failed to be a great journalist in Omaha and has had to move back home, she intends to clean up her relative's house - and with the help of Nick, the handsome man who's restoring the old wreck, finds the dead body of Wilkie Melnik (who seemed to have fathered half the town) in her kitchen closet. In a series of increasingly hilarious events, several people claim to have murdered the man. First Shayla, his daughter, with a beer can full of antifreeze (which Wilkie had intended to use on Shayla's cat); then deputy Hal (courtesy of a frying pan); and of course the turban-and-caftan-wearing Tallulah Pritchard, the head of the Melnik Historical Society, who shot him (after he was already dead). With poison, a head wound, a bullet hole, and having discovered to be smothered, which method actually killed him? And with the vast majority of the town being suspects (including Wilkie's wife Rosie and his pregnant girlfriend Donette), can Carrie and Nick find out exactly who - and why the dirty deed was done?
Next up is "Pride and Pestilence." Librarian Bonnie is in her mid-thirties and starting to feel very alone. With her parents dead and her younger brothers moved out (two to college and one married with kids of his own), she's starting to wonder if it's possible she'll be alone for the rest of her life. But thanks to a midnight thunderstorm, Dora Clemson's 1975 rust-bucket Chrysler New Yorker, and a handsome stranger, her life's about to get very interesting. When lightning strikes and Dora crashes her car into the museum, Bonnie's life is saved by the handsome Joe Manning, a new man in town who came to meet his father, miserly Sven Gunderson, for the first time. Unfortunately for him, his father is shortly found dead in a (formerly) locked closet in the museum. With suspects for the murder including Clara, the Crazy Pie Lady of Melnik (who sells her pies [such as cherry-marble, d-Con a la mode, and pork chop and minty shaving cream] on every Monday to the residents of the town, who buy them to support her but never consume them) and Kevin Melnik, son of the ill-fated Wilkie (murder victim of the book before), it's up to Bonnie and Joe (plus a little help from Cousin Junior the sheriff and, of course, Maxie the Mouse) to solve this crime before the murderer strikes again - this time a little closer to home.
Lastly is "The Mice Man Cometh." Tyler Simpson, torn between missing his control-freak, small-town-hating wife Liza (dead from a road rage car accident during "Pride and Pestilence"), moves back to his hometown of Melnik from Omaha. While cleaning and preparing his new law office to open for business, Tyler and his two sons meet their intriguing next-door neighbor, a British anthropologist named Dr. Maddie Stuart. A real-life Snow White, this clumsy Brit has come to Melnik to write a thesis she's sure will catapult her career into fame (more like infamy!). The subject? The residents of a small American town who seem to worship an obese mouse named Maxie. But when a dead body is discovered in Tyler's law office clutching Maddie's locket, implicating her in the crime, she realizes there's a lot more to this quaint little village than meets the eye. Tyler, who is under the impression Maddie finds him sad, angry, and grieving, is appointed as her lawyer and is forced to help her as she bops in and out of jail. Add in some new members of the fast-growing community (including a vampire-like mortician/barbershop quartet member named Dolph, a hippie husband-and-wife antique dealer team, and a plumber named Jamie Bobby), this crazy town might have just found itself in the middle of a mess from which it can never recover. But Maddie and Tyler, thanks to Maxie and the rest of the town, are about to discover that despite the mice and the murders and the suspicion, Melnik just might be the best place in the world to live.
These three books are extremely funny, very well-written, and filled with engaging characters. Small-town America comes to life in a tongue-and-cheek way, poking fun at the cliché things which seem to define small towns while bringing to the fore the best things about living in one - the fact that everyone in town loves and supports you, and you've always got someone there to help you through the good times and the bad.
A great book for a rainy day by the fire or a sunny day at the beach.
December 20, 2009
Absolutely the best cosy mysteries I've ever read! Crimes solved by "Maxie the Mouse" world's largest fieldmouse - who happens to be stuffed. Really, do I need to say more? Carrie and her screaming fear of mice gets the series going and it doesn't stop. Well, it does, but I wish it didn't :D
June 20, 2011
At first I thought this was way too over the top silly. The more I read the funnier it became. I really like this author and wanted to read some of her earlier writings. I really enjoyed this series after I got into it and couldn't put the book down.
January 28, 2019
Mary Connealy is one of my favorite authors.
Really.
But I don't like mice.
This book includes a trilogy of short books that she wrote and all of them include a mouse. A big, stuffed mouse. Ick.
However, if you can look past the furry rodents in the stories, they are funny, crazy, and sweet stories. I really enjoyed them in spite of the rodents. I can definitely relate to the character in the first story, named Carrie. (She is horrified by mice)
A very enjoyable series!
Really.
But I don't like mice.
This book includes a trilogy of short books that she wrote and all of them include a mouse. A big, stuffed mouse. Ick.
However, if you can look past the furry rodents in the stories, they are funny, crazy, and sweet stories. I really enjoyed them in spite of the rodents. I can definitely relate to the character in the first story, named Carrie. (She is horrified by mice)
A very enjoyable series!
February 2, 2012
I picked this up at the local Good Will. I was itching for a mystery that sharply contrasted with the Stephen King horrors I had just finished. I would call these stories/books fluffer pieces. They aren't too substantial, but they are a little bit refreshing in their simplicity. I might recommend this to someone who just wants a little quick read with some downhome moments.
July 27, 2009
Pretty good and quick read...its a 3-in-1 book. Interesting spin and easy to read in the car.
Read
September 30, 2009YA Conn
January 3, 2010
Boring.....corney.......
March 17, 2010
This is a quirky comical christian romance mystery series. There were some pretty funny parts. Overall, three quick light reads.
February 13, 2011
Christian mysteries with a touch of romance. Good read!
March 28, 2011
So cute!! All 3 books. Very quirky little town where no crime happens, until a string of murders because of the town hero- a giant field mouse. Romance meets clue hunting. I really enjoyed them.
June 13, 2013
I found this book to be very amusing. The story is easy to read and hard to put down.
March 2, 2014
Three mysteries in one including romance and adventure and lots of laugh. A good Connealy book.
April 30, 2013
Fun read...
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews