Tammy Barker – Ruff Drafts

Call In For Murder: A Neon Desert Novel
by Tammy Barker

About Call In For Murder

Call In For Murder: A Neon Desert Novel
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – Nevada
Independently Published
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 19, 2025
Print length ‏ : ‎ 238 pages
Paperback
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8999862600
Digital
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8999862617
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FVMJMQ3R

Call-in radio host Ashley Compton is Las Vegas’s best friend when it comes to giving relationship tips to strangers. But when a repeat caller is found murdered after exposing her woes on the air and accepting the challenge to put up or shut up, Ashley questions if her homespun advice was the catalyst for the murder.

Afraid of losing her job and destroying her reputation, Ashley heads to the seedy side of Las Vegas to snoop around. There she encounters shady dealings: lies, gambling, adultery, and potential criminal activities. When her two-timing and felonious suspects spout glib excuses to justify their behaviors, she digs deeper and is threatened, injured, and gets what she dishes out: advice she doesn’t always like.

Can Ashley’s sleuthing skills catch the killer, or will she end up just another crime statistic? Can she save her career, or will she be put on the Do-Not-Call list?

GUEST POST

What is a Cozy Mystery?

If you are an avid mystery fan, you probably know the various sub-genres of the mystery group. But I thought I’d start with a refresher. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the most popular sub-genres:

Cozy – an amateur sleuth

Traditional – an amateur sleuth or Private Investigator

Locked room – impossible crimes, at first

Paranormal – ghosts, psychics, and/or magic

Historical – at least 50 years prior, with the most popular tending to be the 20s-40s

Suspense – what might happen

Thriller – time clock of what will happen unless it is stopped

Hardboiled/Noir – gritty, corruption, and usually includes a Private Investigator

Caper/Heist – usually comedic, and is more about the crime planning than solving the crime

Legal – courtroom dramas usually included as thrillers

Police procedurals – a step-by-step of the investigation

Medical – involving medical anomalies for crimes

Espionage – international spy, or corporate are the most popular explanations

Let’s go back in history a bit about the mystery.

Back during the Golden Age, several British mystery writers (Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterson, Ronald Knox, and a few others) created The Detection Club. This was formed to maintain a level of standards in detective fiction, called the fair play rules, which later became known as Father Knox’s 10 Commandments (https://murder-mayhem.com/the-detection-club-rules). It was considered tongue in cheek, because many of the authors back then didn’t agree with the rules. But apparently Knox put them in place anyway. They also created an oath (https://elegsabiff.com/2013/04/20/a-z-challenge-rules-of-the-detection-club-circa-1929/) that basically promises to use intelligence and not gut reactions to solve the crime.

Times have changed over the decades, and many of the rules aren’t followed anymore. The point of the rules was to keep an author honest, respect the reader’s intelligence, and make sure there was no surprise that no reader could have anticipated. At least that’s how I interpret the rules.

And in case you didn’t know, The Detection Club still exists.

Is there such a list of commandments for the cozy mystery? Officially? There is no club with a list of rules, although there should be. But a cozy mystery has its own standards and expectations the author should follow, albeit some rules are stretched or bent, possibly taking it out of the cozy realm and into the traditional or even further.

Murder happens off the page. Usually, the dead body is stumbled upon.

No gratuitous profanity. This can go to the extreme of no cussing at all, just using Sesame Street swearing, or the occasional damn.

Sex must be off the page, if romance exists in the story (which is not mandatory).

No children or animals are harmed in the book.

It must be an amateur sleuth with a separate occupation and/or hobby included in the plot, a private investigator, or is retired. There is a plethora of occupations used, with some even have inserts, like recipes, scrapbooking tips, etc.

The setting is a small town or a portion of a big city (like Soho in New York City).

The characters are a close-knit group, with at least one quirky character (that’s my addition. I think it should be mandatory, but it isn’t).

It often has comedic relief, from just a small amount to being a flat-out comedy of errors type.

An observant reader may not figure out the villain, but the explanation at the end will always lead to the reader saying, “oh yeah!”, not “huh?”.

Justice must prevail.

In other words, a true cozy mystery would be rated G on the silver screen, with traditional mysteries possibly crossing the line to barely rated PG (not even PG-13, in my humble opinion). My stories are just over that invisible line for two reasons:

My stories take place in cities and not always kept to a specific niche area (the big city is what I know).

There is not gratuitous language, but I do have some innuendos.

Some believe Agatha Christie is the queen of the cozy mystery. Her birthday is hailed as National Cozy Mystery Day. I don’t believe her work is exclusively cozy, and many of my author friends agree. Some examples of her books that are not considered cozies are:

The Body in the Library – Miss Marple

Death on the Nile – Hercule Poirot

And Then There Were None – stand alone

Ordeal by Innocence – stand alone

Endless Night – stand alone

When people ask me what a cozy mystery is, I don’t point to Agatha Christie. My reference point is the television show Murder, She Wrote. There are many people who’ve never read a mystery get that reference. Thinking of a formal tea is another wayh to look at it. If you want to learn more about the cozy mystery sub-genre, check out the Malice Domestic Convention website (https://www.malicedomestic.net).

One final note. I created my own cozy mystery oath for the readers:

Do you promise to gently bend book spines, read each story with an open mind, use the skills amateur sleuths have bestowed upon you, applaud shenanigans, enjoy the travel to mundane and exotic places alike, laugh out loud, become fully vested in the characters, cry over heartbreaks, read just one more chapter, and overindulge in chocolates and beverages?

Well, do you?

About Tammy Barker

TAMMY BARKER

Tammy Barker is a serious, by-the-book Washington DC government accountant by day and a wildly imaginative fiction writer by night. She writes contemporary traditional amateur sleuth mystery novels and historical pulp fiction short stories. Her other loves include reading anything, restoring or refurbishing vintage items, small home repairs, cooking and baking, classical piano, and wishing she lived during the 1940s and 1950s. She is on Facebook, and her website is https://tammybarkerwriter.com.

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