A Field Guide to Death and Deceit – Returning to Harry, Emma, and Michelle L. Cullen
In A Field Guide to Murder, Michelle L. Cullen introduced Harry Lancaster, a semi-retired anthropologist with a battered hip and a lifetime of fieldwork behind him.
We also met Emma Stockton, the nurse-turned-caregiver who accidentally became his sleuthing partner. Their first case grew out of a neighborhood murder that pulled them into danger while they were still figuring each other out.
A big part of that debut’s charm came from watching their cross-generational bond take shape under pressure, and the second book, A Field Guide to Death and Deceit, picks up soon after.
Harry and Emma are just back from a three-month consulting stint in South Asia, exhausted, jet-lagged, and trying to get a report finished when the past literally calls.
Right away you can feel Cullen’s confidence in her duo. Their banter is easy, their rhythms are familiar, and the book assumes you’re ready to jump back into their world of tea, reports, and unexpectedly dead bodies.
A Call From the Past
The story kicks off with a phone call Harry never expected to get, from Willow Blakely, his high school sweetheart and the woman he hurt badly decades ago.
Willow begs him to meet her at Green Meadows Farm, a property not far from his Ohio home, insisting she has nowhere else to turn and that he “owes” her for the way their breakup shattered her life.
Harry is already tired and wary, but the guilt of that old relationship pulls at him, and Emma, ever protective and suspicious, insists on tagging along when he decides to go.
When they arrive at the seemingly deserted farm in the mist, they find an eerie, rundown farmhouse, and unfortunately Karl Andersen, the farmer, dead in his barn.
As you can imagine, by the time the sheriff arrives, they are very clearly at the top of his suspect list!
The Scam That Started It All
One of the most interesting choices here is that the crime at the center of the book is built around a financial scam rather than a more familiar ‘he was a bad guy’.
Willow turns up at Harry’s house shortly after the body is found and admits she has been conned out of almost all of her retirement savings in what she thought was a real estate investment that would fund a shelter for women and children.
Her story comes out in layers. She met an apparently kindred spirit at the local library, was introduced to a supposed farmer’s son, and ended up liquidating her investments to buy the farm in cash, based on the promise of a quick flip to a developer.
Willow is humiliated, terrified, and clinging hard to her dignity, and that explains both why she hesitated to go to the police and why she turns to Harry after reading about his amateur sleuthing in the local paper.
Throw in the arrival of Harry’s estranged brother, Edgar, and suddenly we have plenty of side-stories to move things along nicely.
Cozy Vibes Aplenty
Even with a barn murder and a ruined retirement fund, the tone stays firmly cozy. Harry’s kitchen, his tea rituals, and the familiar condo community with its pond and fountain act as a home base that the story keeps circling back to.
I particularly liked Emma’s evolution from a more nervous, unsure personality in the first book to a far more confident and capable young woman in the second.
One teeny criticism would be the very limited tease with Emma and her potential romantic interest, Nate, which was bubbling under the surface but didn’t get much air time in A Field Guide to Death and Deceit.
Author Michelle Cullen could very well be playing the long game here, but I would have liked that to have moved on more – maybe in book 3??
What I liked most is that this isn’t a puzzle that exists in a vacuum. The scam that sets everything in motion feels painfully plausible, and the family dynamics around the farm are messy in the way real families are.
Harry and Edgar also have their own issues, and Edgar’s employment revelation was certainly a bit of a surprise, but it made sense in the context of catching the culprit, which was fun.
Why It Works As a Second Installment
As a second book, A Field Guide to Death and Deceit does what you want a series entry to do. It builds on the relationships from the first story, deepens the characters’ histories, and opens up the world in a way that leaves plenty of room for future cases.
With the introduction of Willow and Edgar, we got a bigger sleuthing team, but that ultimately didn’t affect Harry and Emma’s partnership, which feels more settled.
They still clash, they still misread each other, and they still have to negotiate what “being in this together” actually means when the danger is real!
If you’re coming in fresh, you can follow what’s happening without having read A Field Guide to Murder, but readers who know how Harry and Emma first bonded over a neighborhood killing will pick up on all the little echoes and callbacks.
The book rewards that familiarity without ever turning into a recap, which makes it a nice fit for ongoing cozy readers who like to feel as if they’re dropping in on old friends rather than starting from scratch each time.
