Crooked Lane
Published September 15, 2026
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
A Field Guide to Death and Deceit is an entertaining, character-driven novel, the second outing for Harry, a widowed seventy-something anthropologist, and his caregiver-turned research assistant-turned fellow amateur sleuth, Emma. They met in the previous novel, after Harry broke his hip and – with some reluctance – employed Emma, a former ICU nurse, to look after him. By the time he’d healed from his injury, the insightful yet cranky old Boomer and the relentlessly cheerful Zoomer had solved the murder of one of Harry’s neighbors, in the process becoming minor local celebrities and fast friends, who engage in a lot of fond intergenerational bickering.
This time around, Emma, although still conflicted about her career path, has unloaded a fiancée who was all wrong for her, and hired on as Harry’s assistant during a consulting job, evaluating health-care projects for a foreign aid organization. They have just returned from a few months’ worth of field work overseas and are still pretty jet-lagged when Harry’s phone rings; Willow, his high-school girlfriend, whom he hasn’t seen since he broke her heart over fifty years ago, is demanding his help, but she won’t explain any further without meeting in person. Harry, who is more sentimental than he looks, feels guilty about the way he left things all those years ago, and rushes to meet her at a farm outside of town. Of course the curious, protective Emma insists on coming along for the ride.
When they arrive at the farm, Willow is nowhere to be found, but the owner of the property is still on the premises; they find his lifeless body in the barn, impaled by a sharpened corn rake. When they finally track down Willow, she explains that she was lured into a real estate scam involving the sale of the farm without the owner’s knowledge. From here on, many things happen that only make sense in the universe of cozy mysteries, where clever unlicensed detectives keep on tripping over cadavers, encountering wildly coincidental clues, and applying their particular life skills in order to solve murders and prevent more mayhem. This duo is so likeable, however, that it’s worth spending a few hours in the cozyverse with them, as they enlist the assistance of a diverse crew including a couple of bawdy retirees, a teenaged hacker, and most notably, Harry’s older brother from out of town.
Edgar, the brother, is debonair in a shady kind of way. Even Harry doesn’t really trust him, but Emma, along with nearly every woman he meets, finds him charming. It’s little wonder he’s been married six times. No one actually knows what he does for a living, but he appears to know a lot about finance, accounting, and real estate transactions: expertise that comes in handy when it comes to unraveling the complex scheme, involving embezzlement, identity theft, and real estate fraud, which led up to the farmer’s murder.
Much of the fun arises out of watching the two elderly brothers learn to appreciate each other after a lifetime apart, spurned on by sibling competition and their mutual goals of obtaining justice for Willow, who’s starting to look like a suspect in the farmer’s death, while preventing any harm to the smart, but impulsive Emma. Joining them in that latter concern is the cute local cop, who turns out to be pretty good company even if he does remain two steps behind the amateurs until nearly the end of the story. The plot and the crime have a lot of moving parts, and Cullen neatly weaves together all the loose threads to create an exciting, satisfying conclusion. Not only Harry and Emma, but any of their supporting cast, are subjects worth studying, in field guides yet to come.