New Books Network Interview: Katie Tietjen

I read a lot of cozy mysteries, both contemporary and historical. What makes the difference for me is usually not the mysteries themselves, although I love a good puzzle as much as the next person, but the characters. And by characters I have in mind the detectives as well as the victims and the potential suspects. The decision to end the life of another person—even in a novel—seems intensely personal. Or perhaps I should say that it should be intensely personal, based on relationships gone wrong, people too damaged to work out their problems through words, or a failure of communication so great that I can believe that, if only for a moment, raw rage triumphed over common sense and self-preservation.

For me as a reader, the detective needs to share that curiosity about what sent someone off the rails to the point where murder seemed like a reasonable option. (I’m also a sucker for cat detectives, but that’s another story.) As you’ll hear in my latest New Books Network interview, Katie Tietjen has created such a character in her amateur detective Maple Bishop. Read on to find out more.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

When we meet Maple Bishop in the first book in her series, Death in the Details, she is reeling from a series of life-changing circumstances. Rural Vermont in 1946 doesn’t have a lot of use for a childless widow with limited means of support and even more limited interest in knitting, baking, and chitchat. Maple ruffles feathers, including those of Ginger Comstock, the leader of local female society in Elderberry, the very small town where Maple moved two years before with her doctor husband, Bill. That’s another strike against her, in fact: Elderberry is the kind of town that accepts newcomers slowly, if ever. It doesn’t help when Maple, who builds dollhouses to fill her empty days and decides to sell them to supplement her income, uncovers a murder. Even the local sheriff barely tolerates what he sees as her interference in an open-and-shut case.

Fast forward a few months, and Maple’s situation has improved—a little. In Murder in Miniature (Crooked Lane Books, 2025), she’s still something of a social outcast, but her dollhouses have acquired a new purpose and she has a few more friends in town. Even the crotchety sheriff has developed respect for her abilities. So when a cabin fire on the outskirts of town creates an opening for Maple’s particular gift for re-creating a crime scene, he doesn’t hesitate to ask for her help. Neither of them could have predicted that this case will bring them into contact not only with big city criminals but also with a mystery from Maple’s past.