Today I made potato soup…

Posted on January 11, 2026 by McKenna Dean

Today, I made potato soup. It’s a favorite comfort food of mine, and the weather today was perfect for it. Earlier today, a snow squall blew up from nowhere, and for about 30 minutes, it looked like blizzard conditions outside my window.

But then the snow cleared, and the sky grew bright and cold. I chopped onions and thought about a woman a thousand miles away who won’t be sharing dinner with her family tonight. A woman who had just dropped her kid off to school, and with her dog in the backseat, was shot and killed by an ICE agent.

I thought about why she was killed. About the circumstances that set this action into motion. About the agent’s recorded words to her after he pulled the trigger. About how it wasn’t enough that she was turning away, about how he had to have the last word and he said it with violence and a gun.

I thought about how this woman is being vilified now to make her death more palatable to a base that was fine with death and inhumane treatment as long as it happened to the Other and not to them. Oh, she was married to another woman? Then that’s okay. She wasn’t one of us.

But she was one of us. As was the woman who was shot in her bed during a botched police raid, and the man shot at a traffic stop for telling the officer he had a registered firearm, or the man who said, “I can’t breathe” as the life was crushed out of him.

I chopped onions and and thought about so many people whose stories I don’t know because being a white woman I was raised on a different narrative. My thoughts were messy and chaotic because everything is messy and chaotic right now. It’s as though every bit of news is designed now to make you believe everything is hopeless and you’re going to die–public health and safety is crumbling, and our civil rights are eroding. The Constitution has been removed from the government website and our checks and balances are flagrantly ignored. Climate change statistics and historical documents are being scrubbed even as the White House has been gutted for a vanity project. Armed, masked men are kidnapping people off the streets and see nothing wrong with killing a protester.

The message is loud and clear. Stay home, or you’re next. Give up. We’ve won. We have no use for anything but “us” and our definition of “us” becomes more narrowly defined every day.

I confess there are days when this message works on me. When I make soup, and it isn’t the onions that make me cry. Then I look at my family, my friends, my community and I think, “You can’t make me give up on them.”

And so I make soup. Walk the dogs. Meet with my crit group and talk about writing projects. Read books that comfort me. Watch movies with my family. I also look around me and ask myself what is something I can do this week for someone else to make their lives better? Maybe it’s donating to a food pantry. Helping a friend financially or with my time. Maybe it’s reporting ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s gofundme for legal expenses because a) the government is paying them and b) raising money for a possible murder defense is against gofundme’s TOS. Perhaps I send some money to Second Harvest because Minnesota’s SNAP program funding has been cut off. I’ll take that money I would have spent on a streaming platform that has become another government mouthpiece and donate to a victim’s gofundme, or help a stranger online meet their rent or medical bills.

It’s not much. I know that. But it’s what I can do. Because all these little things are seeds of hope, and hope IS resistance too.

How I lost $45K as a writer by a simple misunderstanding

Posted on January 4, 2026 by McKenna Dean

Did that title get your attention? Because it certainly got mine.

Many of you may be aware of the historic 1.5 billion dollar settlement of copyright infringement claims in the Anthropic class action lawsuit. Anthropic essentially took books and articles from the pirate site, LibGen, to train their AI model. A LOT of books and articles. Fiction, non-fiction, scientific journals, you name it.

Library Genesis claims to be a shadow site offering “free” copies of all your favorite works, ie it’s a pirate site where thousands of documents and copyrighted works have been illegally made available. LibGen maintains it exists for the furthering of scientific information by making scholarly documents available for free.

Sure, Jan.

Earlier this year, it was announced that a settlement at been reached, and that authors whose work had been appropriated could apply for their share of the payout. I did the search: 15 of my titles (under 3 different pen names) had been used by Anthropic. According to the terms of the settlement, as an independent author, I was owed three thousand dollars for each book used to train Anthropic’s AI system. Traditionally published authors would receive the difference split 50-50 with their publishers.

15 books at $3K a pop comes to $45K in restitution.

But here’s the catch: all works had to be registered with the US copyright office in order to qualify. Now technically, the act of publishing something automatically confers copyright on your work. Copyright registration varies depending on the project but my works would have run about $45 per book.

And I didn’t do it. I believed what I was told, that the act of publishing my books alone were sufficient as copyright, and I didn’t need that additional step–or cost. Frankly, it was an error on my part as a newly independent author, but it turns out a lot of pretty famous writers discovered that their Big Name Publishers hadn’t registered their works either!

I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse. All I know is I am going to see if I can retroactively register my existing works now, and I will be paying that registration fee on everything moving forward from here on out.

I don’t even want to think about what a difference $45K would have made to my life right now. I’d have rather not had my books stolen to create AI slop in the first place.

A Nose For Death wins a BIBA!

Posted on November 30, 2025 by McKenna Dean

Remember when I posted a few weeks ago about A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) being shortlisted in the Mystery and Mayhem Awards? Well, in an different award contest, I just found out that this same book has won a Best Indie Book Award! You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out. I really had no expectations going into this contest–I enter these things mostly for exposure and to get my books seen by more people. So to actually win an award was completely unexpected!

Then this morning, I discovered Nose was a finalist in the 2025 Best Thrillers Book Awards! I have to tell you, when you struggling to believe in your work, it’s lovely to get this kind of outside validation.

How do you think I should celebrate?

Why I’m Considering a Digital Detox–and so should you

Posted on November 16, 2025 by McKenna Dean

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that a) it’s gone dark for months, almost years at a time (only becoming active if I have a new release coming out) and b) I’ve been mulling over the negative impact of spending so much time on social media for a while now. The reason for this blog being such a dead zone is directly proportional to the time I spend on other social media sites.

I look at the increased time spend on sites such as TikTok (where I get the most engagement), as well as Instagram, Facebook, etc and I can say that all the dancing and mugging for the camera has increased my traction as a writer. Maybe not much, but more than if I did nothing at all. I can look at my book sales for proof. Since the release of A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) in April, scarcely a day goes by when I don’t make at least one sale, and on a good day, as many as ten. That’s a far cry from when I first started publishing and I was lucky if a book made 50 lifetime sales.

But all that jumping through hoops has come with a cost: to my productivity as a writer, to my ability to focus and complete a single task, to my mental health, to my belief that kindness and empathy should be valued traits and not shunned.

To the belief that creativity is a uniquely human trait, and that we will always need art, music, and stories shared by our fellow beings.

And every time I say I’m going to do a digital detox to reset my brain and my mental health, I always have a “but, but, but…” as a reason to keep scrolling. I’m about to release a new book, I need to promote the last book, I have events planned online, I don’t want to lose traction with readers, I just started an Instagram account for the puppy, I’m considering becoming a UGC creator so I can finally realize my dream of retirement and can devote myself to writing full-time…

But I’m barely writing at all. Maybe a thousand words a month. I’ve lost confidence in my ability to tell a cohesive and entertaining story. I can’t complete a paragraph without the driving urge to pick up the phone and check my latest TikTok numbers. And this is after I decided to stop trying to market so much and concentrate more on writing again. Time and again, I’d tell myself I needed a digital detox. I’d manage to go a few days, and then I was right back again, checking Bluesky first thing in the mornings, posting to Instagram in the afternoons, and TikTok at night.

This morning (on Bluesky) I came across a post that really resonated, however. It was from @earthlyeducation on Instagram, and in it, the speaker explained that in the past, capitalism drove colonization and land grabs–but now that there is no more land to be colonized, our time is being colonized. Our time and our data, so that we’ll spend even more time on social media and can have even more ads specifically tailored to us.

It was a shocking revelation for me. This notion that social media platforms need to expand by grabbing more of our time and attention. It shouldn’t have been, given how much our social interactions have changed since the advent of smartphones. I can readily accept that social media is a source of much misinformation and deliberate manipulation of the news. But this idea that my time is being stolen from me much in the same manner as land and labor has been stolen from so many people before now was somehow astonishing to me.

So yeah, I’m thinking a digital detox is in order. Maybe until the New Year. Maybe longer. Will I severe ties with social media entirely? Good question. Maybe we’ll get this current book drafted and then we’ll see.

I’m sharing the @earthlyeducation post with you below. Something to think about.

“Cozy” is Not a Dirty Word

Posted on November 9, 2025 by McKenna Dean

It seems like everything these days has “cozy” as a descriptor added to it. Cozy mystery, cozy fantasy, cozy games. As a cozy mystery writer, naturally I don’t mind this. Wikipedia defines a cozy mystery as “a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community. Cozy mysteries thus stand in contrast to hardboiled fiction, in which more violence and explicit sexuality are central to the plot. The term “cozy” was first coined in the late 20th century, when various writers produced work in an attempt to recreate the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.^[1]”

I like this description because I cut my teeth on the Golden Age of Mystery. My mom was a huge fan of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Patricia Wentworth and more. Lord Peter Wimsey was one of my first fictional crushes, and to this day, I feel sad for the pre-teens who grew up crushing on Edward Cullen instead. I write cozy mysteries because I love this subgenre and long to recreate that vibe in my own storytelling. I like the descriptor because when I pick up a book in that subgenre, I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. That’s the value of genre reading.

That doesn’t mean that I never desire to read something grittier or more graphic. Lord Peter resides cheek-by-jowl next to Eve Dallas on my bookshelves. I’ve recently fallen in love with cozy fantasy, and I adored The Spellshop by Sara Beth Durst. (I have the second book, The Enchanted Greenhouse, sitting on my TBR stack like the prize gem in a dragon’s hoard). This doesn’t mean I don’t own a copy of Jurassic Park, or that I’d never re-read the Lord of the Rings.

For me, “cozy” is more of a mood than anything. It’s a certain vibe I’m seeking when I pick up a book. It’s because I want the banter between Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe Emerson. It’s because I wish to battle wits with Miss Marple, or soak in the atmosphere of a deadly cruise down the Nile. I do think this is a large part of the appeal of the subgenre–people talk about cozies as being low stakes books, but the stakes are still there for the protagonists. It’s just that our female amateur sleuth is not likely to be targeted by a serial killer and the dog always lives. The magic-using protagonist hiding out from the anti-spell casting government might be in danger, but the village will stand up to protect them.

Cozy reads aren’t necessarily my comfort reads, though they can be. I can be happy with a ridiculous amount of violence if I love the characters and I know everything will turn out all right in the end. What makes it a comfort read is I know these criteria will be met when I pick up the book to read it again. I love the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, and re-read them frequently. Ditto scores of other sci-fi and urban fantasy books. Ilona Andrews is an autobuy for me, and I have everything they’ve published in print.

But when I’m browsing online, in a bookstore or library, trying to decide what to read next, quite often I’m going to gravitate toward something with “cozy” as a descriptor. I don’t know about you, but I need a lot of soothing these days. The news is a constant bombardment of all the ways in which we are going to die (and suffer while doing it), so yeah. I’m re-reading and re-watching a lot of old favorites. The last thing I need is for my entertainment to wound me. The “cozy” descriptor (mostly) allows me to choose new material without bracing myself for an unseen blade being shoved into my ribs.

Even in my embrace of all things cozy, I admit, I get a little tired of the majority of books in this genre being set in bakeries or craft stores. I get it–baking and crafting are how many people immerse themselves in coziness. I am doing a lot of baking now myself, having discovered 3 Doughs 60 Recipes by following @mostlybree on bluesky. I’ve also revived my old bread starter recipe, and while I am still working the kinks out of it (I get fabulous tasting bread that won’t rise), I take pleasure in doing something besides doomscrolling on the weekends. But as someone who is a terrible baker and doesn’t craft, I find myself longing for cozy mysteries set in other environments.

There appears to have been a recent complaint in the gaming community, however, that gaming is taking cozy too far by introducing cozy versions of popular, violent games. That “cozy” is somehow a disease poisoning their good times. Now, I’m not a gamer; I only heard this referenced through a blog post on The Book Wyrm’s Hoard, so I don’t have all the facts. But the blogger’s talking points are sound:

If you don’t like “cozy” you don’t have to consume it. It’s not for you.
“Cozy” as a descriptor is associated with people who identify as female. And we deserve to have our space, too.

Cozy is not a “dirty” word. For one thing, cursing isn’t allowed in cozies. 😉

If you don’t like it, that’s fine. It wasn’t meant for you anyway.

Celebrate Your Wins, Big or Small

Posted on October 23, 2025 by McKenna Dean

Yesterday, I found out that A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) has been shortlisted for the Chanticleer International Book Awards in the Mystery and Mayhem division. This was completely unexpected. My experience has been that later books in a series tend not to do very well in awards contests because there is often too much backstory to be judged as a standalone. I entered mostly because I know these events are good at getting more eyes on a story, the better to increase visibility.

I almost didn’t post about it, because there are a lot of talented writers and terrific stories that got shortlisted as well, and the steps to climbing to semi-finalist, to finalist, and eventually to winner, are steep. No one remembers who won silver in the Olympics, right? Only gold.

As soon as that analogy came to me, it immediately brought back to me the events surrounding the 1994 Winter Games. I’ve always been a big fan of ice skating, though I haven’t followed it in recent years. At the time of the 1994 Games, however, the eyes of the world were on women’s figure skating, primarily because the assault of Nancy Kerrigan at the US Figure Skating Championship orchestrated by a group of conspirators connected with one of her main rivals, Tonya Harding. Kerrigan was bludgeoned above the knee with a police baton by Shane Standt. The goal of the attack was to prevent Kerrigan from competing in the National Championships, from which the top competitors would be chosen to go on it the Games.

Despite suffering what could have been a career ending injury, Kerrigan worked hard to make a comeback, and was granted an exemption to the Nationals in order to be on the US Ice Skating Team. She delivered some of her best lifetime performances but lost gold (in what was considered a controversial decision) to Oksana Baiul. Controversial because it was one of the closest calls in ice skating history, and because the judges defended their decision by citing Baiul’s program was skated with artistry, and Kerrigan’s with caution.

I watched those performances. I’m not a qualified judge by any means, but I would have to agree. Thirty-one years later, I can still remember Baiul’s winning skate. She skated with passion, precision, and grace, despite having suffered a collision with another skater in the warm-up arena and requiring Games-approved injections in her back and shoulder for pain. Kerrigan’s performance was elegant and controlled, and it simply fell short at that place and time.

What struck me the most afterward was how bitterly disappointed Kerrigan was about her second place win. I get that she came back from a terrible assault, overcoming her injury with a level of determination and fortitude I doubt I could ever muster. How disappointing it must have been to be that close to winning gold after all she’s been through, only to lose it to a sixteen-year-old at her first Olympic Games. But Kerrigan was caught on mike making a disparaging comment about Bauil’s emotional reaction to the win, and later again, was heard to seemingly belittle her arrangement with her Disney sponsor as being “cheesy.” The media, who’d championed her in the wake of her assault, suddenly turned on her in this apparent display of poor sportsmanship.

But I wonder if this isn’t more emblematic of the US view of competition. Winner takes all. No glory in anything but the gold. If you’re not the winner, you’re a loser. Maybe this is not a uniquely US perspective, but sometimes it certainly feels that way to me.

It seems to me that if you only acknowledge the gold medals in your life, you are depriving yourself of a lot of the joy that comes from smaller, every day wins.

So I am determined to celebrate all my wins, big or small. It is truly an honor to be shortlisted for the Mystery and Mayhem Awards, knowing I’m standing up there with the Olympic contenders in my genre. Gold may be out of my reach. I may not even make it up on the podium. But I’m an Olympian just the same.

Reclaiming My Creativity, One Step at a Time

Posted on September 30, 2025 by McKenna Dean

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I am a slow-but-steady writer. Since I began my publishing journey, I’ve written and published a book a year. When I mention this to my non-writing friends, they are astonished and never fail to ask “How do you find the time?” The truth of the matter is that time is not nearly as big a factor as finding the energy or bandwidth, particularly after an emotionally, mentally, or physically demanding day at work.

Truth be told, when it comes to being considered a successful writer these days, that kind of productivity is far too slow. There are people in the industry who produce a finished novel every 60 days. In order to gain traction with your audience, it seems like you have to write at least 3-4 books a year, something I will never do. If anything, my process is becoming even slower than before. There are a lot of reasons for this. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m 15 years older than when I started my publishing journey. I’ve worked very hard to make a name for myself as an author, and I’ve finally decided that I no longer have the energy to jump through all those hoops.

Not only do I no longer have the bandwidth to shake my little tambourine and chant my name for the masses, I barely have the energy or mental capacity to write. I’ve been working on my current WIP for a little over a year now, and I’m still nowhere close to finishing the first draft. Normally, I’d be ready to publish by now. Getting Covid this summer didn’t help. I kept a persistent low-grade fever for weeks, lost my sense of taste and smell, and worst of all, brain fog swept in to blanket every writing session with a gray mist of ‘what the heck were you thinking when you wrote this?’ each time I sat down at the keyboard. Fifteen years ago, blanking on words or struggling to capture the concept I had in mind was just a sign of fatigue and that it was time for a break. That I’d been running on fumes too long. Now I find myself wondering if my brain is turning to mush or is it the toll of the constant bombardment of daily bad news?

I’ve made a few decisions in this past year that I hope will help. I have stopped hoping that my writing pave the way for me to write full time. I’ve even stopped demanding it serve as a fallback retirement plan. It just needs to break even–to be an expensive hobby that (mostly) pays for itself. Accepting this level of “success” doesn’t mean I didn’t try hard enough or dream big enough. It simply means I can no longer keep trying to appease ever-changing algorithms, and dashing from platform to platform constantly spinning plates on sticks to keep entertaining my so-called audience.

That decision alone has meant I can spend less time on social media, which I hope will help with my regrettable tendency to doomscroll. The only reason I’m on social media is because everyone says I MUST maintain an author presence. Fine. I’ve decided that presence will be more of squatting on real estate than actually running a B&B at a financial loss. I’ve got better things to do with the short amount of time I have left on this planet than to make myself miserable because the things I’ve achieved aren’t “good enough.”

I’d been pushing myself to finish this current story by the end of this month. Today as a matter of fact. There are all kinds of theories as to the best time of year to publish–and if you only release one book a year, the final quarter isn’t it. January isn’t great either, unless you are writing a self-help or exercise book. But this story has gone from being something I thought was a cool idea to being a project I loathe working on. I don’t want to shelve it because I have too much time invested in it. I also fear if I quit at this point, I’m setting a bad precedent for myself–that I can just walk away whenever the going gets too hard. So now I’m looking at not publishing this WIP until maybe next spring, and the thought of missing my One Book A Year goal made me hyperventilate a bit.

But I’m unhappy with the story. It’s a new-to-me genre with a lot of worldbuilding and it stopped being fun a while ago. I’ll sit down to write a paragraph or two, writing and deleting the same sentence over and over again as I fail to put into words this big picture I have in my head.

The other day, I realized I no longer have to hold myself to a rigid schedule of write-publish-release. I’m allowed to publish whenever I want. The rules don’t matter.

I also realized what’s wrong with the story as it stands right now. I’ve erased all the real conflict and given the characters cartoon problems to deal with. I’ve softened the hero to the point of being ineffectual. I’ve strengthened the heroine to the point that she has no journey over the course of the story. I’ve diluted the relationships because I don’t want to deal with the emotions these character should be having. I’ve wrapped my story in a protective layer of cotton padding because I wish that my own elbows and knees were padded, and that I knew I always had a soft place to land in case of a fall.

I even gave the main character a mental block preventing her from experiencing her emotions because I must have subconsciously wished for the same. To be the strong, bad-ass heroine of my own story without doing any of the work to get there. This emotional shell around my characters–around the story as a whole–is self-preservation for me in a world I find depressing, discouraging, and terrifying right now.

But for the story to be its best, I need to take a nutcracker to that shell and break down to the meat of the characters. This little epiphany resulted in the first little spark of excitement I’ve had for this story in a while. So I will not publish before it is ready. I will take my time to make the story the best it can be. And I will put in the effort of making my characters work for their happiness.

It means there probably won’t be a McKenna/M.K. Dean release this year. But there will be one eventually. Because even though I am writing for me now, I’m also still writing for you. And I want you to enjoy the journey as well.

Maybe “Try” is Good Enough

Posted on August 17, 2025 by McKenna Dean

It’s no secret that I’ve been struggling for a while now to find some indication that I’m making progress with my life and not simply treading water. I’ve been on the planet long enough to know that even though it feels like I should have gotten my act together decades ago, the truth of the matter is most of us are just winging it on a day to day basis.

And yet we still have this notion that we must succeed at all costs. That every day should be productive, that every minute should count. As a slow writer who has been bogged down even further by the sheer onslaught of utterly horrific news on a daily basis–and who is also very much aware of the practical amount of writing time I have left on this planet–the fact that I sit spinning my wheels is frustrating on most days and downright depressing on others.

I’ve recently been forced to rethink why I write. Most of us become writers because we love reading and storytelling, and are happiest creating our own stories with our fictional friends. I started publishing because I wanted to share my stories, but also because a tiny part of me was hoping for some sort of retirement plan. I’ve written about why I am no longer willing to jump through the marketing hoops, but taking the pressure off myself from trying to appease the Algorithm Gods didn’t magically restore the joy of creating stories for me either.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s very difficult to be creative when your creative well is dry.

The other night I got into a conversation about how frustrated I was with my lack of progress in everything–how I might have 10 minutes a day to commit to something at best. How can anyone expect to make progress in ten minutes a day? The answer I got was “ten minutes a day is better than zero minutes.”

The conversation led to a series of thinky thoughts I posted on Bluesky, and I’ve decided to screencap and share them here.

I suspect many of us feel like we might as well smash the violin. But if we did, we’d never know the joy and satisfaction of what we might achieve some day.

A departure into poetry

Posted on July 25, 2025 by McKenna Dean

Author Hiria Dunning runs a weekend writing prompt over on Bluesky called #pretendpanel. Each week, she comes up with fun challenges that really make you think about the answers. I’ve been participating (when I can) for a while now, and I encourage you to do the same. The premise is simple: pretend you’re on an author panel answering the offered question. This month, the prompts have focused on short verse form, something that is not my forte. I’ve jokingly pointed out that even when I set out to write a short story, it turns into a novel on me.

I love short stories, but I truly believe they are an art form I don’t possess the skills to create. Ditto with poetry. Today’s #pretendpanel prompt was about sharing some short-form writing, either your own or a favorite of yours.

I used to write poetry in high school. Didn’t we all? Fortunately, most of it went by the wayside. I’d kept a few favorites in a notebook but when I went to find the notebook this morning, I couldn’t locate it. Do I still have it somewhere? I don’t know. I have lots of blank notebooks. Beautiful, funny, inspiring blank notebooks that I leave blank because I’m afraid of ruining them with my messy handwriting and messy thoughts. But that is another story altogether.

Odds are the notebook–the one with a handful of semi-terrible poems–is around the house someplace. It’s also equally possible it got lost in a move, or tossed in a fit of Marie Kondoism. Who knows. I’m not even sure I mourn its loss.

But there is one poem I wrote that I’d regret losing, and fortunately, I found a copy in my dropbox.

I’m sharing it as part of the #pretendpanel prompt for today

Siblings

With shaking hands, I performed the rituals that would keep the room safe.
That would corral the monsters everyone said did not exist and seal them in the closet overnight.
But the magic could not keep out the noise, the sound of raised voices and splintering wood.

In the morning, I looked down through the shattered railings, shocked by the raw wood visible beneath the white paint, as though broken bones were sticking out from underneath torn skin.

And he was gone…like he did not exist. Not to be seen again, except on rare occasions, like Christmas and funerals. And we did not speak of him, not son, not brother.

Lying in a heat-soaked room, living for the breathless moment when the fan would oscillate in my direction.
Gasping for air like a little bluegill.
She left her narrow bed and knelt beside me, whispering, “If you don’t stop making that noise, I will kill you.”

She, who chose to hold adulthood at bay by starving her body into adolescence.
Littering our room with the detritus of desiccated meals not eaten.
She who ran away and hence did not exist, not spoken of again, not sister, not daughter.

And I, praying not to exist, began painting my room in beige. Beige walls, beige eyes, beige hair, beige skin. With each stroke of the paint brush, I am not here, I do not exist.

She of great passion and raging talent would not go away quietly. She left in a storm of slamming doors and bitter tears. She, too, ran away, existing but not existing. A fledgling with her mouth open in a nest far away.

I stumbled into a wall today, paintbrush in hand. Stared in shock at the gray paint dripping from the end of the brush, an anemic life force spattering on the floor. With shaking hands, I performed the rituals that would unlock the door, the door that had long since been painted over. I am here, but I do not exist. I cannot leave. I am the Good Daughter.

There you are. My one and only adult attempt at poetry. Maybe I can find a use for those blank notebooks after all.

A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) is now available!

Posted on March 28, 2025 by McKenna Dean

It’s finally here! A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) is now available! For some reason the print version on Amazon is a little slow to go live, but it’s now up as an ebook and print book on Amazon. It will soon be live on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, or you can ask your library to stock it through Hoopla and Overdrive, if those are your preferred platforms. What can I say? Amazon is speedy, so if you can’t wait, grab your copy there. If you’d rather support different sites, the price is the same across them all.

Cover art for A Nose for Death, depicting A German Shepherd sitting in a lane with fencing on either side that leads to a lovely house in the background. Behind the dog, there is a bloody axe in the driveway.

Isn’t this cover adorable? I made high-pitched dolphin squeals when I saw this from Melody Simmons at Bookscre8tivecovers.com. Here’s the blurb:

A storm. A dog. And a body…
Ginny Reese and her dog Remington are back in a thrilling new cozy mystery by award-winning author M.K. Dean.

Veterinarian Ginny Reese is adjusting to her recent inheritance in the small southern town of Greenbrier. After a storm takes down one of the outbuildings on her property, her dog, Remington, discovers human remains in the ruins. When the victim turns out to be Vicky Coleman, an old high school classmate—and former girlfriend of Sheriff Joe Donegan—both Ginny and Joe become suspects and are sidelined by a new investigative team.

Ginny’s relationship with Vicky Coleman ended on bad terms and she feels obligated to find out what happened to her former best friend. Doing so will stir up old memories and feelings, potentially derailing whatever it is Ginny is rekindling with Joe. But Vicky played some dangerous games that put her in the crosshairs of a killer, and if Ginny isn’t careful, she and Remy will end up in the killer’s sights as well.

A Nose for Death is the fourth book in the highly acclaimed Ginny Reese Mysteries, and the stakes have never been higher. Make sure you have time to read when you pick up your copy because you won’t be able to put it down!

I can’t wait to share this with you! I’ll be doing a live on TikTok tomorrow evening (Saturday 3/29/25 at 7 pm EST) with author Dori Saltzman (Death of a Travel Advisor) to discuss writing mysteries, but also writing series. Do join us! My account is https://www.tiktok.com/@mk_dean_author. We look forward to seeing you there!

I’ll be updating this post with the other links as they go live!

McKenna Dean Romance

M.K. Dean Mysteries

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