01 - The Cart Before the Corpse

Hitch your imagination to an intriguing new mystery series set in the world of competitive carriage driving--an elegant yet cut-throat realm in which gorgeously costumed drivers and their magnificently harnessed horses vie for championships in the challenging obstacle course of the show ring.

Jane Austen, meet Mad Max.

Fans of the long-running Mossy Creek Hometown Series will gallop to bookstores for this spin-off equine mystery series by veteran Mossy Creek author Carolyn McSparren, a nationally known novelist and expert carriage driver, who owns and shows carriage-driving horses in her home state of Tennessee.

Open your barn doors and fasten your (buggy's) seatbelts for THE CART BEFORE THE CORPSE.

Famous southern carriage-horse trainer Hiram Lackland, a handsome widower, dies mysteriously after retiring to a farm outside Mossy Creek. His estranged daughter, Merry Abbot, also a horse trainer, arrives to settle his estate. But Merry quickly plunges into bit-chomping dilemmas when her father's friend and landlord, mystery-novel maven Peggy Caldwell, insists he was murdered.

Before Merry can so much as snap a buggy rein, a handsome and annoying GBI investigator, Geoff Madison, is on her case. Then there's the troublesome donkey: Don Qui. Short for Don Quixote. And the fact that Hiram was teaching all of Mossy Creek's lonely women how to--ahem--drive his carriage.

Can Merry rein in the truth? What kind of horse play was her rakish dad involved in, and why would someone want to giddy-yup him into an early grave?

Stay tuned for the answers in this first episode of, "As the Carriage Wheel Turns."

This is one wonderful ride! --Virginia Brown, author of Dixie Divas

Carolyn McSparren's grandfather held her on a horse when she was two. That moment began a love affair with horses that has continued all her life, even when she lived in cities where the only horses she saw were either pulling carriages through the park or maintaining crowd control.
Although she longed for her own horse when she was a teenager, her parents couldn't afford to buy or keep one, so she set her dream aside. While in graduate school at the University of North Carolina life intervened. Carolyn fell in love, married and followed her new husband overseas.
After five years in Europe, Carolyn returned to the States with her Army officer husband, a fourteen-year-old step-daughter, and what the British call "a bun in the oven." She earned her Master's Degree from the University of Memphis, then became a developer of continuing education programs in business.
After her first published book, a Harlequin Super Romance titled, The Only Child, she has gone on to publish ten more. She's won multiple romance novel awards on the state and national level. She's served as president of the River City Romance Writers in Memphis, TN, and is founder and first president of Malice in Memphis, a chapter of Sisters in Crime.
Carolyn lives in the country outside Memphis with her daughter, Megan, her husband of 38 years, George, three horses, four cats, and a basset hound. Over the years Carolyn has known many veterinarians, farriers, trainers, riders, dog and cat fanciers, and general animal people, all of whom love to tell stories.