Hi, Jenny. Welcome to the What's Your Next podcast.

Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited to talk about these books today.

I am so excited to chat with you. As I was telling you before, one of my favorite New John, new to me genres that I've been like deep dive and I'm passionate as a super reader, is this mystery, romcom mystery Romans. Space that it's not romantic. Suspense is not, thrillers, is not too gory, but it's, there's a little bit of murder and there's a mystery and there's a little bit of our Christie, but there's a romance aspect of it and you do so well. So I'm very excited to chat with you.

I accept the compliment. Yes.

So before we get started, tell us a little bit about your saddle.

So I

am this is my sixth book. Cross Your Heart and Hope He Dies is my sixth book that comes out January 20th, 2026. And I wrote several Ya

Ya

Before. I loved, I wrote a lot of historical action adventure. That had a little bit of romance, but was more about, the world possibly ending. And I got to a career where, you know, I, I had written these yas, I was really happy with them, but I was also kind of looking at, okay, what's next? What's on board for me? And I really thought, what are all my favorite things? I love mystery. I love romance. I've been a big romance reader since I was like 12 and accidentally found a historical romance that was about King Louisie the 14th. And I was like, oh, I'm, this sounds interesting. And then it got real steamy real fast.

fast.

Yeah.

And so I like, I love romance, I love mystery. And it's the kind of genre that it feels like it's, I think the best kind of books feel like something that you've already seen or already read or already heard. And so as soon as these ideas of these mystery romcoms came to me, I was

like,

yeah, this feels like a movie that I've already seen and I loved and like I want more of it. And so, I'm really excited that I got to make

books.

I'm excited that I'm hearing from more authors that they're gonna be coming out. 'cause I do think I'm like. Look, I love a good mystery. I love a good romance. I'm like, Joey Tribiani, put your hands together, my friends.

So we gotta talk about most of our listeners are familiar with romances because we've been talking about romance for almost 10 years. Mystery is a pretty much not a new genre. It's been around for a long time, but for listeners, they may not know what mystery is, how different it is from what they assume is a thriller, domestic suspense, psychological thriller mysteries. Talk to us about the mystery aspect of it from your perspective. 'cause your books are not obviously there, there's a mystery, there's a murder of some sort. There's a chase, there's a puzzle that you're trying to solve and it's not as gory. Well, no, it could be gory, but it's not as gory as a major trigger warning.

Yeah. Well, and I think that's a great question too because a lot of people who have not read mystery before don't realize that mystery a lot like romance is a very robust genre and there are lots of subcategories to it. In the same way that his romance can have historical or contemporary or a

romcom

or romantic now is very popular. Mystery is the same way. You can have a cozy mystery, which is sort of more this. The style of story that my books are, which are, yes, there's been a murder, and yes, there's some danger, but it's not psychological. It's not thriller, it's not gory. Like you said, there's thrillers, which are like every, it feels like every page there's a new twist and the stakes are high, and they're often dealing with sort of dark topics in a way that other mysteries don't. There are more newer type mysteries, which I love. There's the classic, the what they call the golden Age, which is where Agatha Christie comes from. You have your Dashel Hammetts, you have I'm blanking on any other classic

Dorothy Sayers, I think is

Yes. Yeah, and I think PT Cast was one of them. And so, there's all of these. Great sub genres that you can tell a story on. What I really liked about, and this is, and I'm not, I will not take credit for this, but it was an inspiration for me. There's been this sort of new movement in mystery within the last, I'd say. Five to 10 years of generally. Cozy mysteries have very specific rules and they're usually set in one location. They're about a quirky cast of characters. You have your detective, like your Agatha Raisins who come into a community or a part of a community, and they're a little bit smarter than everybody else, and they're a little bit ahead of the game, and they're kind of solving. These mysteries and honestly, Agatha Christi, even though she's classic, her kind of storytelling would fit into that cozy genre. Cozies 10 years ago were, it was usually like retired women, like in their sixties, seventies, sometimes eighties in English villages who are solving crimes with all these other retired people. And they really felt like they were the domain of. A certain age and a certain type of reader, and then all of a sudden we got this wave of what I've been hearing called millennial cozies, which are the same thing.

There's.

This cute town. It's almost like a small town romance, but instead of romance, there's a murder where you have these cute towns and these sort of plucky, interesting heroines, and there's a murder and they've gotta solve it. And so you've got your Finley Donovan series, which has been really popular in that space. Mia P Manansala, who did Arsenic and Adobo fantastic. Series. One of my favorites is Gigi Pandian writes her under skeleton lock and key series, the Secret Staircase series, and there are these young women who are in careers who have goals and lines and there might be a romance involved. And all of a sudden they are, in this space and it feels fresh and new because it's a new kind of main character who's solving these cases. And they can be a little unsure, a lot of them. Especially like from my first book she doesn't have a clue. Kate Valentine is such a mess. And it was such a joy to write somebody who could be messy and really bad at it. And then in my new book cross Your Heart and Hope

Dies,

Juliet Winters is, hardcore. She believes that, I'd be really good

this.

I'm good at everything. And so when she is maybe not that's a fun little rude awakening

her.

And I think those millennial classes also take place in bigger cities. Adobe nursing is set outside of Chicago. I think Finlay Anonymous in Virginia, like they're major cities. So it's not like this idea of isolate a small town that we just don't exist like. The henna Swansons might be like in this, like this place, but these are actually like Chicago. There's Portland, there's like New York, like places you wouldn't think of a cozy mystery. But you know what? There's a lot of murders that happen.

That's usually where the murders are, to be fair.

Yeah. But the one thing I like about these cozy not this I really the idea of millennial mysteries is that you don't care about the the killer. Like you're not really worried about it. Your main driving force is the amateur sleuth trying to figure out how to make. Sense of the world and make sense of things and the character arc, personal growth from that space as opposed to being like, who murdered this person and trying to catch it. It's someone down the street who may have done it and solve the problem, may solve the puzzle, but it's not the whole driver of the book.

Yeah.

That

they feel like your friend and you're trying to sort of solve it along with them. Hey, let me help you out. Can I sit in the car with you on this stakeout while you try to figure out if this guy is. Cheating on his girlfriend or whatever. Yeah. And in a way that I think a lot of previous detective stories, even cozy mysteries, the detective always felt a little bit removed because they were smarter than everybody else. Yeah. Ms. Marple saw things that nobody else saw. Poot is obnoxious, but nothing gets by him. You've got these characters who are really good at what they do, and we like that.

do, and we like that.

We like watching. Experts do their job. But I really like in this millennial, cozy space that it's no these are women who have jobs and careers and lives and they're trying to get their stuff together and murder just keeps happening. Very inconveniently around that.

Yes. Let's talk about your series. Because it does fall, it's a little bit unconventional because it follows two different main characters, which is a little bit different. When we think about long running series, I think Mia Gonzales follow different characters in the story. But this one is very, I was expecting Katie to come back and give up and then I was like, wait. It's a whole new character. So because this is unconventional for someone who is a long running series, Finley Donovan is Finley Donovan's the whole way through the Catherine Mack is Eleanor Dash, the whole way through.

right?

So talk to us about the decision of having a different sleuth, a different character, a different romances, a different space. Is it, does it feel like a standalone contain, even though it does, it serves in the same rural as the publishing company and all the aspects of the publishing company we learned in book one. What was the decision to decide, move away from the first character to how it's standalone three.

So

the first book she doesn't have a Clue follows Kate Valentine,

is

a bestselling author who has been sort of roped into going to her ex-fiancee slash

editor's

weekend wedding. And then she gets accused of poisoning the bride when she's found with the body. And so it does take place in this world. This publishing world of Simon says is the publishing company. It's set in Seattle. They're a small, one of the last gasps of independent publishing. And so it's this great Pacific Northwest. It's an isolate. It happens on an island. It's very much like a, a. This remote, Victorian manner out on an island in the middle of the ocean, like no one is escaping until we find this killer. And then book two follows, Juliette Winters, who is her marketing manager at Simon says. And we learn in book one that Simon says is really struggling financially. And in book two they're really on the brink of collapse. And Juliet has engineered this

book deal that's like the deal

it's this really juicy tell all memoir from this local business guy who has

this exclusive country club.

And so his memoir sort of promises to tell all of the secrets of the elite in his country club. Unfortunately for Juliet, he drops over from a heart attack and

the manuscript

goes missing on the day of the book announcement. So now she's gotta track down this missing manuscript, convince the police that the circumstances of his death were not so natural or innocent, and she's gotta try to save both her job and her publishing company in the same space, so they're set in the same world. There's a lot of overlap. Kate Valentine from Book one makes a big. Reappearance in Book two. Juliette is in book one, but I really, because these books are meant to be a true mashup of murder, mystery and rom-coms. I really took inspiration from the way that romance books handle. Multiple characters in a series. And what they usually do is each book focuses on a different couple. So it might be like three brothers, and each book is about a different brother. Or it might be like five girls who are in a band together. And each band member gets a series. And what I really love about that and what I like to doing here too, was that it gives you the opportunity to explore a whole new set of a whole new character arc. A whole, you

can look at

the story from a different perspective. Juliet Winters is a very different character from Kate Valentine. They're complimentary, but they're very different, and so I really got to play around with very different dialogue. I got to put her in different circumstances than Kate was able to go into.

It really

felt like I got to tell, I got to play in the same world. We get to see all of our favorite characters from the last book, but I got to tell a new story. So anybody coming to this series can come in at any point.

I like

to talk, speak of them as standalone companion novels. Yeah, So you can read across your heart first and be totally fine. You can read she doesn't have a clue. And then immediately know who everybody is when you go to cross your heart. And so that was kind of the goal there was to be able to follow a different romantic couple, be able to tell a standalone mystery, but also to be able to get to

see

all of our favorite

So I felt

like I gotta

do the best

of both worlds from mystery and romance by being able to approach it that way.

Yeah, I think yours are the perfect companion. If you're a romances reader who wants to dive into aspect who wants to who? doesn't wanna deal with romantic thrillers or romantic fans. And he just wants something fun. Because it's like the perfect companion. It's more romance driven in some ways than the myth driven. And I think it's a great place to get started. Which for my listeners. Hello. This is the perfect place to get started as opposed to trying a Finley Donovan, that the romance is built upon time and the mystery is much more forward, this stuff. So yes, so just how to market,

yeah,

and I like to tell people whatever kind of reader you are, there's plenty of that and more so if you are primarily a romance reader and you're looking for something a little cloudier, something a little more, Story driven. These books will give you plenty of romance while also still giving you that plot if you're a mystery forward

reader.

But you're looking forward, if you want some more of that human connection, you want a little bit of spice, but you're not ready to dive fully into the deep end of Dark Romance. These are great books for you. So it really, I feel like whatever you like this will fulfill, it'll scratch that itch, but then also give you a little bit more to help kind of introduce you to other genres. So you might not be

I have to say she doesn't have a clue who has a great like handy, like the massive solve the solution with a wild animal running around the island. It's like it's the perfect locked dorm room mystery that you're like, okay, it's, everything's gonna be okay. I don't know, but we're just gonna have a awesome, go out with a bang,

and I feel like that's, I have a very similar, let's go out with a bang ending for she doesn't have a for cross your

heart and

Hope. Hope he dies. I feel like anyone who has read any of my young adult novels knows that I usually go for broke at some point in all of my stories.

Yeah, so they're delightful. So for listeners to make sure to pick off, she doesn't have a clue and hope crossed your heart. Hope he dies as your next books to pick off. So Jenny, tell us what kind of books you

So I'm

I've nonfiction.

Reader, and I don't know if it's just an age thing or I spend so much time working on fiction that it's a

palette

cleanser, but I really love to read well done nonfiction. And like Mary Roach is

of

my favorite nonfiction authors. She wrote one of my favorite books called Stiff. The curious life of the human cadaver. And it's all about how bodies that have been donated for science get used in all these different ways. And, but she just, which sounds so, I know it sounds like very morbid, but it's, and it kind of is if you're into that. But also, she's such a fantastic writer. She writes she's just having a conversation with you. She's really warm, she's funny. And it feels like I'm reading fiction, but I'm learning something at the same time, and I love that approach. So that's a lot of what I read now. And then if I read fiction, a lot of it is horror. I really love horror. Cannot watch horror films, cannot do it, cannot do the jump scares cannot do that. But I feel like horror novels are really good at questioning what makes us human and what happens when we test that

humanity.

Or when someone else challenges that humanity. And I think that there's, it's such a refreshing genre 'cause you really do not ever know where it's gonna go. Yeah. You don't know how things are gonna end. Nobody is safe. And sometimes the endings really leave you feeling really unsettled, which is the best kind of book. It's such a good book. So that's primarily what I read these days.

All right. So in nonfiction, do you have any specific rabbit hole that you have gone down? You're like, oh my God, if I see it, I buy it, I listen, I do it, I just go down. For me, it's pop culture. Any type of millennial pop culture related from malls to TV shows, oral histories, anything. I see it,, I dive into it. I loved it. As someone who's nonfiction is my new go-to genre, what's your rabbit hole for you?

you Ooh, I like that question. I love to read anything about big discoveries. Of any kind especially anything that talks about sort of turning points in history, but specifically around like sciences.

And

I love reading, like archeological nonfiction about discovery. I read it as research

one

my way books, but ended up reading it for fun. But I read. Howard Carter who discovered the Tomb of King Totten Common he wrote like a three book series and so I read them as research 'cause I had a series on archeological

Action Adventure.

And, but I read it 'cause his tone was so great and he was kind of a little bit. Caddy about whatever. Because to be fair, he was really advanced for his time. He was ahead of what everyone was doing and he came into archeology at a time where most everyone was sort of like doing cowboy archeology, where it was just rich British guys going in and dynamite things and taking all the gold for themselves. Like it was really kind of the wild west. And he came in and really applied a lot of scientific. Procedure to the archeological discovery and a lot of what he introduced, we still use in the archeological field today. And so he was rightfully so, but he's very condescending about like everyone else and anyone else's discoveries and how much better and smarter he was. And it was very funny to read at the time. But yeah, I love that. I love, there's. A book that I just finished a while ago called The Poisoner's Handbook, which is all about the creation of the forensic unit like detective unit in the New York Coroner's Office, which happened during prohibition. And so there's all and it is told in these vignettes of. Here's this type of poison and here's how they developed the test for finding it. And here's the case that it was tied to, and here's how these guys pioneered these scientific methods. Another one that's really well done, it feels like fiction. You lose yourself in it and you're like, wait, this really happened? Like what? That's crazy. That's crazy that people were just going around poisoning people all the time, but they were So, I think any kind of genre like that where it's oh, here's how we discovered. How like the radium girls, here's how we discovered that radium was actually really bad for us or here's how we discovered the tomb of A lost Pharaoh, anytime I see something like that where it's here was a big discovery that nobody's talking about, then I will definitely read that.

I love this and I can tell like PO. Can come as a very useful tool for future books. poison is all used in the closing mystery. Everyone

If anyone I know ever gets poisoned, I'm in so much

trouble.

It's all good. So in terms of, I know you had some book recommendations to share with our listeners, our fiction, so talk to some, a couple of those book recommendations.

So I did do both fiction and nonfiction. I did one nonfiction 'cause I just finished this nonfiction book. It's called the Art Thief,

and

it is about the most prolific art thief in history. And it is such a mind boggling story of how much he stole and how long he stole and how he stole

the

things. I mean, he would walk into museums in broad daylight. And snatch things off of displays and then walk out like this was not a smash and grab. And then he kept them. He kept every single piece of art he stole. He was not, he wasn't stealing for profit. He wasn't stealing to fence it. He wasn't part of the black market. He just stole things for his own entertainment and it is such a wild, really well done story. And then the story of the author who wrote it is also very interesting and colors. A lot of your experience of reading it afterward. It's one of those books that I'm now like, I'm throwing it at everyone. 'cause I read it in like a day and it hijacked my brain. It was so crazy. One of those things where I was like, there's no way this happened. There's no way, this is not fiction, but it totally happened. It is

such a

crazy story. Some of my favorite fiction books that I've read recently, and this is another one that I like,

throw at every

woman that I know. It's called the Change. Kristen Miller, and I'm not usually a

club

reader, but this was a Good Morning America book club title, and I read the pitch for it and I thought, oh, that's interesting. Let me try it out. I was hooked by the first page. The voice is fantastic. It's about these three women going through menopause who develop. Powers that then decide to use those powers

help

solve this case of these girls who've gone missing in their sort of upscale vacation town.

And so

it is, so it's the perfect story for like women for feminine Rage, for the stories of how women get sidelined and how our bodies are talked about when they start to change. The voice is just so easy and quick to read and it's funny in a lot of places and it really kept me going through the whole book. I thought it was just really, really interesting and a really good one to talk about with other people. And I was like, okay, this is a perfect book club book. Like this is the kind of book that as soon as you finish, you're like, I need to talk to someone about this. I need someone else to know what's happening here.

That's your book Club Choice. I was like, perfect.

Yes it is. I was like, you know what, that is spot on. I will give you, I will give you future chances. Good Morning

Book

Club. 'cause that was a solid pick. I also recommended

which of

Wild

Things, which

is Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, who's one of my good friends.

And it is perfect

book for this season. It's Autumn perfection. It's three sisters who have, who are witches, who each have their own powers, and it's the story of how they navigate love and familial stress and the life that they're living. And she, Raquel, is also

poet,

the writing is

next level. Just beautiful.

I mean. There are sentences in lines in there that you just sit back and have to take

breath

because they're so truthful and they're so well done.

And she has a

line

in that book

about, sometimes she's talking about seeds because the main character in which of wild things has the power to command plants. And so she's connected with plants. She's connected with seeds and, gardening. And she has this great line about how seeds, in order to grow, they have to break their pods. And she says, in order for things to grow, sometimes they have to break first. And that's such an incredible, I say that to people all the time 'cause that's such a beautiful, incredible sentiment that yeah, sometimes things have to break before they can grow. And and she has, it's a great romance,

great scenes.

Just fantastic writing, perfect for this season. And then I had a couple of recommendations because of course we're talking murder mystery here. I can't get out of here without recommending some mysteries. So some really interesting mysteries that I've read lately were the Magpie Murders and Under Lock and Skeleton Key, which is the Secret Staircase Series by Gigi Pandion. And both of these I think,

do such

a great job of. what feels like a standard murder mystery, but then bringing in these incredible elements that really make it feel fresh and new. So Magpie Murders is like a mystery Toucan because it's this mystery author who has written a book and sent it to his editor, and then he dies without sending the last chapter. So then his editor has to go and try and find this chapter. And as she's doing that, she realizes, oh. Maybe something more is going on here. Maybe he didn't just fall off of this building or jump off as they thought he did. I think something, some, there's a bigger conspiracy going on here, and so it's interspersed with scenes from the book itself and then scenes from the editor trying to solve his murder. And so you're really like reading two mysteries side by side, but they inform each other and they interact with each other and it starts to kind of blur the lines between reality and. and then fiction within fiction. And then Gigi does the same thing in her secret staircase series. She tells these really great Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, but then there's this element of this family creates. Illusions. So the main character is a stage magician in her former life. And so she works for her family making these sort of building, constructing these illusions as part of people's houses and homes and things like that. So it, every single scene or every single

murder,

nothing is ever as it seems, right. There are illusions

and there

are stage tricks, and there are ways that you have to. You have to kind of figure out what's real and what's not. And I just love when murder mysteries, because if you think about it, the idea of murder is such a fever dream. Most of us have

never encountered

this. We've certainly never solved a murder. So when we're reading about these scenarios,

I think it's really

interesting when people will

with the

idea that like, yeah, this sort of sucks you into a different world and a different, everybody else is out there like going to jobs and getting dinner and putting their kids to bed and you're over here like trying tracking down a killer. That's really surreal. And so when they start to play with your sense of reality, I think books like that are just, they're so interesting. They're so well done and they really do just jolt you out of reality and make you think man, what could be going on around me that I'm not even aware of?

I know. It's like you can solve a mystery. You can solve a better at anytime. So, Jenny, tell us your.

So you can find

on

my website is jenny elder moke.com. It's just my name.com. I'm also mainly on Instagram at Jenny Elder Mooch. Although I'm not much of a social media person, so if you don't see me post for several weeks, no you didn't. And I also have a newsletter that I

out

once a quarter that you can sign up for through my website and it's just. Book news. I often answer questions that I get from other writers, potential authors, things like that where they just kind of wanna understand more about the craft or the industry or about, my journey and how that, how I came to where I am today. And so it's, I try to make it low stress, give you as much. Helpful information is possible. I know we all get more emails than we ever need in our life, but if that's something that interests your readers, they are your listeners, they are welcome to sign up. I would love to have them on the list.

Thank you, Jenny, for a delightful conversation.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having Me too. This is such a fun topic to talk about.

Thanks for listening to the What three next. For more book lists, cozy reads and library tips, visit the what three Next block.com. Your next great read might be waiting there.