We’re starting a new feature here that we’d love to have you participate in!
Cozy readers—and especially Chicks on the Case readers—are some of the most creative folks on the planet so we’re asking you to play Chick Pic with us! Give us a couple of sentences … who is this character? What’s their back story? Victim, murderer, nosy neighbor, innocent suspect? The more ridiculous the better! Each comment can build on the next until we have a fully-fleshed out character. Or if you don’t like the direction the comment thread is going, start a new one. Writing is all about rewriting, after all. Let’s have some wacky creative fun!
(Extra points if you can name the Chick pictured … but remember, the points don’t mean anything—ha!)
Chicks on the Case 
This is Betty. She lives next door & under the gardening hat, sunglasses & pruning shears lies the soul of the gossip! But under those hedges she keeps so well pruned also lies her “missing” husband
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Perfect way to start, Ryanna!
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This is Nina. She just has to know the inside scoop on everybody in the neighborhood. But one of these days, she’s going to find out something that is going to get her into deadly trouble.
(Becky, is that your grin behind those aviators?)
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Why yes, yes it is. 33 or so years ago, best I can figure.
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You look fab peeking over those Foster Grants, Becky! I love that everyone has pegged you as nosy, lol!
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I’m trying not to take it personally, Vickie!
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Ninette, who also goes by busybody Betty and Nina, takes full advantage of the fact that she resembles a young Jessica Fletcher. In fact, she is currently posing as Jessica’s long-lost granddaughter–and she’s determined to take possession of a stranger’s charming Victorian on the rocky coast of Maine.
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This is Wilhelm. He is a Moldovan spy and master of disguise, who has snuffed your neighbor Gladys and purloined her house and garden as an ideal vantage point for surveillance. His computer is next to the wall nearest your house, and he is piggy-backing off your internet access to send unencrypted messages threatening the lives of world leaders under your IP address. If you check the Amazon package in front of his house right NOW, you will find either the pancake makeup or the rubber facemask. Then he will be busted, you will be a hero, and the free world will be saved, BUT you will have lost a great future plotline. Weigh your decision carefully…
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Don’t be fooled by the sunny disposition of Ninette, also known as Betty and Nina. She’s a grifter who somehow managed to get possession of that charming Victorian on the rocky coast of Maine, where she now resides and has claimed the position of PTA president. It’s her way or the highway… which is where her body is found on the side of. Residents of Cutesville, Maine are stunned to discover that among her many aliases is Wilhelm, Moldavan spy and fear and suspicion of each other haunt the town as they wonder… did he or she uncover Cutesville’s lobster pot smuggling operation?
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Meet Helen. She appears friendly and outgoing. Everyone loves her. But under her charming demeanor lies a keen observer. She is going to figure out all of your secrets and solve the murder. So, if you have anything to hide, avoid her. Of course, she’s going to figure out you are avoiding her and come visit you, so it is pointless anyway.
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The Black Widow, aka Betty, Nina, Ninette, Wilhelm, Helen, and who actually knows how many more. Her identity only comes up when another dead husband is left in her wake. Pity the fool who falls in love with this woman.
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Ooo! Many, many fools…
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You can say that again…
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And behind master-of-disguise Betty/Nina, née Ninette/Wilhelm, aka Helen’s blue contact lenses lie a pair of eyes whose icy stare can stop victims cold in their tracks.
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Saucy Suzie is a femme fatale, her signature wink over the sunglasses a sight that sets many of the neighborhood men falling at her feet. But did she wink at the wrong man? Suzie is missing from her stylish loft apartment, there’s blood on the kitchen floor, and her signature sunglasses are broken on the floor next to a severely battered wide-brimmed hat. Has Suzie taken an abrupt turn in a new direction, or has someone else decided to steer her fate?
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With that prized Victorian in her sights, Ninettte starts on her homework as she always does. Gathering up dossiers on all the prominent locals helps her figure our which of the locals to befriend, avoid, seduce, and eliminate. Old, young, rich, poor… nobody is left off the list.
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Maybe she gathers them all in the library of the prized Victorian…
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Great ideas, everyone! And this is why I never did well in improv…
Ninette, Wilhelm, Helen, Black Widow, etc. left behind a trail of dead husbands on her way to Maine. She’s also buried quite a few dead bodies under her current pruned bushes.
When her own body is found on the side of the highway, with a lobster pot as the murder weapon, can the Cutesville cops discover who killed her? It could be any one of the quirky residents whose boiling-hot secrets Ninette’s managed to uncover while in town.
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Love it, Jennifer! The Black Widow gets her comeuppance. Lol. 🙂
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This is Sheila and she is a nosy-body. You wouldn’t know it by the way she carries herself. You didn’t see her standing next to the group eavesdropping on their conversation? Look, she’s at another group. Yep, she’s building up her portfolio because when the time is right. . . WATCH OUT!
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I think I have seen her in action at mystery writers conventions…
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By now, her eyes had adjusted enough to make out that he was short and muscular with a dark beard. He smelled of garlic and sweat. Lydia sensed he hadn’t showered in at least a few days.
Love the photo Becky!!
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Oh, that’s Mitzi Gerber, who moved to Boca Raton from a small farming village in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, not far from Interlaken. After accruing serious gambling debt throughout Europe and attracting the attention of both Interpol and a group of French mobsters, she disappeared briefly and resurfaced posing as a minor European aristocrat while sailing as a passenger on multiple luxury cruise lines—which, coincidentally, experienced a rash of jewelry thefts on the ships where she happened to have a stateroom. In Boca Raton, Gerber was seen lunching frequently at the Waldorf Astoria in the company of a famous aging Brazilian polo player who was recently found floating face-down in his tastefully terraced swimming pool. Gerber, interestingly, was named as the sole beneficiary to his considerable estate. In a statement to the press, Gerber was quoted as saying, “We adored one another. Really.”
(Also, I know that has to be you in the photo, Becky Clark, but you look EXACTLY the way I picture Stephanie Plum in my mind when I’m reading Janet E.! Now I’m wondering if you’ve been leading a secret life all these years as a character in someone else’s book series.)
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My secret is out!
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The person that pulled the trigger. It’s a sunny day. They’re working on the yard. There are kids playing nearby. An occasional neighbor waves and nods a hello with familiarity. The person that pulled the trigger. An average person, average height, average weight, welcoming smile. But it wasn’t a good day. No, not at all. Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. It probably all started when the bosses boss said that a family emergency did not warrant time away. If that was the case, everyone would be wanting time away all the time.
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That’s Miriam, the officious chair of the garden club who noticed that the victim, who claimed to be a master gardener, was not familiar with the Latin name for a common primrose leading Inspector Barnaby, eventually, to investigate the victim’s secret identity.
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Linda met Magnum and Higgins on the beach at the club when she and her husband Big Bubba popped over to the islands on vacation last year. It was touch and go when Bubba turned up dead on the tennis courts at the resort, but Magnum quickly discovered Linda’s twin sister Lisa did the deed, hoping to off her sister next and inherit the entire siding fortune!
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And she did off her sister..with that lobster pot!!! But then the even-more-evil twin is mistaken for Jessica Fletcher’s granddaughter and she’s temporarily stuck in that (now multiply haunted) Victorian in Maine rather than in her much preferred sunny locale. She hires a handsome young sailor/ex-Navy-Seal from the Cutesville Yacht Club to sneak her out via sailboat in the dead of night, but just as they pass the lighthouse…
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…. Just as they pass the lighthouse, Betty AKA the Black Widow gets a call from her groundskeeper saying the roses have stem rot and he’ll be needing to thin them. After she disconnects, she suddenly remembers she buried husband #5—or was it 6—under the rose bushes. She frantically calls him back but there’s no answer. She has no choice but to call her evil twin to run over there. “I don’t care how you do it! Just don’t let him dig up those roses!” She didn’t realize what she’d said until they were out of cell range. She hopes the gardener has his life insurance paid up.
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…She hopes the gardener has his life insurance paid up. God knows Betty can’t afford to move again. She’s running out of aliases faster than her twin sister Fiona goes through one-night stands from her Farmer’s only dating site. And the garden center will only let her buy so much fertilizer before they start asking questions she doesn’t want to answer. Betty passed the abandoned button factory, noting another window had been shattered since the last time she was forced to visit the Cleaner. As if by nightmare, her eighty-seven firebird turned towards the dirt lane that could lead only to trouble…
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All of the things that you said, plus she just realized that she knows the perfect person on whom to pin the blame so that no one would even think of looking her way…
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I bet the handsome young sailor’s fingerprints are all over that lobster pot — and all over Fiona!
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… and that perfect person is so guilty-looking all the time, never makes eye contact, and shuffles his feet while answering questions. Bob the engineer, who’d know exactly how to make a body disappear. Not to mention, he lives alone, never watches sports, and hasn’t got the imagination needed to make up a good alibi.
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This is Tammy who looks friendly and out-going but who doesn’t like people in the neighborhood who get too nosy about what is happening in ther neighborhood. She keeps her eye on all the neighbors.
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“Becky” is a life-long resident of Santa Barbara. She will tell you that she grew her gardening center business from the ground up with nothing but her own hard work and total self-reliance. It’s her cover for her globe-trotting husband who finances her flights of fancy and the gardening center is just her latest. But when the body of a recently fired employee shows up in her greenhouse she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation as the prime suspect. Together with her trusty Frenchie, Becky must clear her name while avoiding her recently returned husband knowing anything about what’s happening.
Sorry, I got carried away. 😉
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