Donor 73101: A PIP Inc. Mystery by Nancy Lynn Jarvis @dollycas

About Donor 73101

Donor 73101: A PIP Inc. Mystery
Cozy Mystery
5th in Series
Setting – California
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Good Read Mysteries (August 15, 2024)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 243 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8990936607
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DC5H77N2

Aiden O’Rourke needed cash to help pay for college so he made money by selling his sperm. He was young, attractive, smart…and popular. Now many years later, his offspring are coming forward—eleven of them and counting—and connecting on a website they created called Donor73101.com.

Pat Pirard, Santa Cruz County Law Librarian turned PI, is approached by next door neighbors Tina and Robin who want to start a family. Because Tina was conceived via sperm donation, they want to be 100% certain that their baby and Tina won’t have the same father.

It doesn’t take Pat long to determine that Aiden O’Rourke was Tina’s sperm donor. It also doesn’t take her long to discovers that one by one, his offspring are being murdered. By whom and why? Well, that’s a mystery.

Excerpt

Although it was only a few minutes past 6:30pm, it was dark, not unexpected in Santa Cruz in early January. The Uber driver popped his hatchback and offered to help them with luggage. Tim declined, moving the four suitcases―one for him and three for Pat―on to the sidewalk.

Pat started to pick one up. “Leave it,” Tim instructed. “We can come back outside for those in a minute, but before we bring in suitcases, I want to carry my bride across the threshold.”

Pat giggled. “I’m a modern woman. No carrying needed.”

“That may be, but I’m feeling old-fashioned at the moment.” He smiled at her, put one arm around her back just above her waist, and attempted to scoop her into his arms.

She slipped away from him, laughing as she did. “I bet you can’t catch me before I get inside on my own, my old-fashioned caveman,” she flirted, heading for the front door.

“I can be a caveman if that’s how you want to be carried, but you’re being carried,” he said, his tone full of playful mischief. He gave chase and tossed her over his shoulder when he caught her.

Pat squealed, but was laughing too hard to resist, which is how she came to greet her tail-wagging Dalmatian, Dot, who jumped against Tim’s backside in an attempt to get her head up high enough for the backward slung Pat to scratch her ears; her cat, Wimsey, who abandoned his rule about avoiding Tim and rubbed against his legs, and Tina and Robin, their pet-sitting next-door neighbors, butt-first, draped over Tim’s shoulder.

Interview with Nancy

Private investigator Pat of PIP Inc. was a librarian like us

Hi Jody. Thanks for having me on your blog today. I discovered something that you and I have in common with Pat Pirard, my protagonist in the PIP Inc. Mysteries series I write. We have all spent time working in libraries. I see you were a library assistant. My first job after moving to the county of Santa Cruz in California was as a librarian in a tiny one-staff-at-a-time library in the community of Soquel. I loved working there. My oldest son, a devoted reader, took his first steps in that library and I credit his love of books and reading to the time he spent in utero when I worked there.

When the series began with “The Glass House,” Pat Pirard was the Santa Cruz County Law Librarian, a job she loved and was quite good at, until she was rudely downsized on her thirty-fifth birthday because of a money crunch in the library. She had just spent all of her savings on a used sunshine yellow Mercades convertible and feared she and her pets, Dot the Dalmatian and Lord Peter Wimsey her cat, were going to become couch surfers if she didn’t quickly figure out how to support them. Being a resourceful woman, she printed up business cards declaring herself Private Investigator Pat and distributed them to the local attorneys who knew how good she was at helping them with research for their cases.

Within days, she was offered a job by an attorney she had a crush on, a good thing because being a licensed private investigator requires a three-year internship unless one works for an official of the court system or a government entity.

Pat Pirard is based on a real person, another former librarian who really was the Santa Cruz County Law Librarian. She retired, though, and when she wanted to. She does drive a yellow Mercades convertible, is a marks woman who carries a 357 Magnum most of the time, and now works as a PI.

When I wrote my first series, Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, I was able to use my background as a realtor to make the books feel authentic. I always tell people the murders are made up, but the real estate stories, no matter how farfetched they seem, really happened to me or to one of my associates. But since I know nothing about being a PI, starting the PIP Inc. series meant I needed help to make the series feel realistic, something that’s important to me.

I asked the real Pat for help. She agreed on condition that I halved her age and made Pat Pirard sport green eyes because she always wished her eyes were green. I still do tons of research for things in the books which may be merely a mention or a short reference—I know more about the history of cat litter than any sane woman should because I needed to for one of the books—and try to figure out how things would work, but the nitty-gritty details of investigation get explained to me during long phone conversations that begin with, “Pat, how would you…?”

Pat Pirard’s pets are all mine, though. Dot the Dalmatian is based on my long dead Dalmatian, Dama Pecosa according to her kennel papers. She was known to the world as Freckles, beloved by everyone especially children, and absolutely crazy. One Thanksgiving she knocked herself our cold under our glass-topped dining room table lunging for the turkey. Lord Peter Wimsey, better known as Wimsey, was my husband’s ginger cat. He was elegant and brave, but the Wimsey in my books has the personality of Granite, one of our other cats who was notorious for falling asleep on the back of a chair and falling off of it in her sleep.

Like Dot, I know Freckles would have defended me with her life. That little library where I worked was open nights. There was a man we thought watched the library who would come in whenever the librarian was there alone. He’d announce that it was hot in the library and start to disrobe, encouraging the librarian to join him. The woman I job-shared with and I were terrified of him. The local sheriff assigned one of his deputies to monitor the library to try and catch him, but nothing worked. Finally, in desperation I took Freckles with me to the library.

The librarian sat on a chair behind a solid counter. I put Freckles leash on her and put the hand loop under one leg of the seat. People came and went all day long; she dozed or sat and no one even knew she was there. Night fell and the stalker arrived. She instantly jumped up, put her feet on the counter, bared her teeth and growled. We never saw him again.

About Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Nancy Lynn Jarvis wore many hats before she started writing cozy mysteries. After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News, as a librarian, as the business manager for Shakespeare/Santa Cruz, and as a realtor.

Nancy’s work history reflects her philosophy: people should try something radically different every few years, a philosophy she applies to her writing, as well. She has written seven Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries; five PIP Inc. Mysteries; a stand-alone novel “Mags and the AARP Gang” about a group of octogenarian bank robbers; edited “Cozy Food: 128 Cozy Mystery Writers Share Their Favorite Recipes,” and short story anthologies, “Santa Cruz Weird,” and “Santa Cruz Ghost Stories.”

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