What I Learned About Women While Writing a Murder Mystery

See if this resonates with you.

When I started writing Purple, Blame, Game, I thought I was writing about a murder.

That’s how most cozy mysteries begin. Someone dies. Someone asks questions. Someone eventually discovers whodunnit.

But somewhere around the middle of the manuscript I realized the real story wasn’t about the crime at all.

It was about women.

More specifically, it was about the strange ecosystem that forms whenever a group of women gathers around a shared purpose—whether that purpose is solving a murder, running a charity project, or crocheting stuffed bunnies for hospitalized children.

Women do not simply show up and behave.

We form constellations.

In my fictional shop, Time in a Bottle, the women arrive with yarn and crochet hooks. On the surface they are there to produce small handmade rabbits for a hospital charity project. It looks wholesome. It looks cooperative.

And it is.

But it’s also complicated.

There’s the loyal friend who quietly keeps the whole operation from falling apart.

There’s the woman who shows up with baked goods and sharp opinions.

There’s the one who is watching everything and saying very little.

There’s the one who believes she is the moral center of the universe.

And there’s always—always—the woman who knows more than she’s saying.

Women’s relationships are rarely simple alliances. They’re layered with history, observation, small grudges, admiration, protectiveness, and the occasional urge to throttle someone with yarn.

What fascinates me is how quickly a group of women can shift from social gathering to crisis management.

In Purple, Blame, Game, that shift happens the moment a child appears to have bruises on her arms. Suddenly the comfortable rhythms of crafting are replaced by suspicion, loyalty tests, and moral judgment. Women who were laughing together five minutes earlier are now standing on opposite sides of a social canyon.

And yet—this is the part that interests me most—they don’t scatter.

They stay.

They argue. They defend. They speculate. They protect their own. They cook more food. They keep crocheting.

Women endure conflict in groups in ways that men often don’t.

Instead of walking away or throwing a punch, they circle closer. They talk more. They test theories. They try to read one another’s faces.

In other words, they investigate.

That’s why cozy mysteries so often take place in communities of women. A book club. A quilting circle. A knitting shop. A garden society.

Put a group of observant women in one room long enough and two things will happen:

Someone will figure out what’s really going on.

woman with short blond curly hair looking surprised because she just figured something out

And someone else will wish they hadn’t.

Which brings me back to my poor protagonist, Kiki Lowenstein.

All Kiki wanted to do was make stuffed bunnies for sick kids.

Instead she found herself in the middle of a social wildfire, watching women choose sides, draw conclusions, and reveal their true characters.

The murder may be the official mystery of the book.

But the real puzzle—the one I keep returning to as a writer—is how women decide who to believe, who to protect, and who to blame.

That, in my experience, is where the most interesting stories live. Do you agree? I’d love to hear what you think!

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Mystery Mondays

(March 9, 7 p.m. ET at Joanna’s Readers.)

My guest will be Chrissy Chicory. She’ll be giving away a copy of her cozy paranormal mystery, Hollyhock and Sticky Buns. It’s the first full-length novel in her Nettles B&B ParaCozy Mystery series, set in a slightly haunted Victorian bed & breakfast on the Florida coast.