Down to Earth (The Daw County Sisters Mysteries) by Tammy D Walker

Please help me welcome today’s guest, Tammy D Walker sharing her new release, Down to Earth (The Daw County Sisters Mysteries)

Blurb: Stacey Hengesbach has enough to worry about with a pecan harvest, festival preparations, and a daughter who’s eager to leave their tiny hometown all needing her attention. So when a radio antenna tower falls, seriously injuring its owner, she’s willing to believe it’s an accident like everyone else in the county does, including the sheriff. But then another antenna tower falls, this time on her best friend’s cafe while they’re inside. With the help of her family, friends old and new, and the local ham radio club, Stacey races to solve the mystery of the falling antennas before another one comes crashing down.

Link: https://books.tammydwalker.com/down-to-earth

Bad Weather and Good Community: Storms, Radio, and Cozy Mysteries

Lightning flashes. Thunder shakes the house. In a cascade of noise, emergency alert texts clash with the wind howling just outside and the warning sirens wailing a block away. My family and I gather in a safe place in our house, an interior room with no windows.

Once inside the room, I grab one of the radios I’ve stashed there earlier, knowing we might have severe weather. Beside the hand-crank weather band radio with its USB charger and light is my other go-to in an emergency: my hand held radio with the local amateur repeater frequencies programmed in it.

While my husband looks up weather radar on his laptop and one of the kids tunes into our local NOAA all hazards radio stations, I’ll listen to the frequencies area weather spotters might use to report local hail, high winds, and tornadoes. Living in an area where we can–and do–get severe weather that develops quickly, I’m grateful that we have good coverage from our news outlets about storms so that we can stay safe. And hearing the reports from trained storm spotters nearby gives us an even clearer picture of what we could prepare ourselves for when clouds and rain have us in the dark, sometimes literally, should the power go out.

We often think of radio as just a technology, or as a one-way medium, as in the stations that broadcast news on the AM bands and music on FM. But for me, radio is far more than that. Radio is about community. While much of that community is focused on entertainment–music and sports, for instance–there’s a significant number of radio enthusiasts whose interests lie in how we can use the technology to help people stay safe in different kinds of crises.

So when I started writing Down to Earth, the second novel in my cozy crime series, The Daw County Sisters Mysteries, I wanted to bring radio in as a way to explore community. Because, after all, community is at the heart of cozy mysteries, in the way people come together, are driven apart, and return to each other again.

For Stacey, the main character, radio is tied to serving the people around her through the activities of the amateur radio club she’s in. It’s also integral to her sense of home, through nostalgia for a now-closed music station she loved in high school as well as her curiosity about a new enigma showing up on the FM band. And, since this is a mystery, a fallen radio antenna tower kicks off the central question of the book: who sees communication as a threat and why?

Back home in Dallas, when the storms clear, I’ll put away our emergency weather radio for later. My hand held radio goes back in its charger on my writing desk. And, like Stacey, I know that when I need it, radio will be there, providing weather reports, entertainment, and a medium through which I can connect with others who want to serve our community.

Bio: Tammy D. Walker writes cozy crime novels, and her latest from The Wild Rose Press is Down to Earth, the second in her Daw County Sisters Mysteries series. When she’s not crafting mysteries or poems, she’s probably reading, teaching, trying to find far-away stations on her shortwave radios, dreaming about travel, writing letters, or spending time with her family. Find out more at her website: https://www.tammydwalker.com/