Trailbreaker (Prairie Nightingale) by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare
About Trailbreaker
Trailbreaker (Prairie Nightingale)
Mystery
2nd in Series
Setting - Wisconsin
Publisher : Thomas & Mercer
Publication date : January 27, 2026
Print length : 299 pages
Paperback ISBN-10 : 1662535996
ISBN-13 : 978-1662535994
Digital ISBN-13 : 978-1662529801
ASIN : B0F5RKCRFK
Suspicions that a serial killer is terrorizing a pristine tourist spot draw a single mom and budding private investigator into a twisting and deepening mystery of secrets and murder. Single mom and newly minted private investigator Prairie Nightingale has opened the doors of her Green Bay, Wisconsin, agency and is ready for work. She and her crew aren’t quite prepared for their first client, though: Bernie Dubicki, a notorious online journalist and not-altogether-reliable provocateur, who claims the idyllic vacation destination of nearby Door County is home to a serial killer. She’s pinpointed four seemingly unrelated deaths that haven’t raised suspicions for anyone else. But when a college student vanishes, Bernie’s sizable retainer convinces Prairie to help connect the dots. And trusted, flirty FBI agent Foster Rosemare thinks Bernie might be onto something. Prairie never expected her first investigation to be so big—like Dateline big—but she does have an inquiring mind and a knack for seeing things no one else can. In this case she’ll have to look deep—not only into the secrets of strangers, but into Door County’s woods—to solve a mystery decades in the making.
About Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare
Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare write critically acclaimed, bestselling mystery and romance, usually (but not always) together. They are the authors of the Prairie Nightingale mysteries and the TV Detectives mystery series. If you want more of their stories, check out their queer romances co-written as Mae Marvel, as well as solo work by Ruthie Knox (het romance), Annie Mare (grounded queer paranormal romance), and Robin York (Ruthie’s pen name for New Adult romance). Ruthie and Annie are married and live with two teenagers, two dogs, multiple fish, two glorious cats, four hermit crabs, and a bazillion plants in a very old house with a garden.
INTERVIEW
1.
When did you first
realize you wanted to be a writer?
We are coauthors, Annie and Ruthie, so we have two different
answers to this question. Annie has wanted to be a writer ever since she read Where
the Red Fern Grows and discovered how deeply books could affect readers’
feelings. Ruthie was a lifelong obsessive reader who dabbled with writing a
little bit in school but spent a lot of her early adulthood as an editor and
knitter before the writing bug caught her in the first few years after her son
was born.
2.
How long does it take
you to write a book?
The first draft of a book takes us anywhere from a few weeks to a
month or two, depending on how obsessive we get about it. But then there’s all
the editing, which takes place in fits and starts over months and sometimes
years! We actually wrote the first draft of this book about five years ago, and
it’s been through five or six rounds of editing as well as a few rounds of
proofreading.
3.
What is your work
schedule like when you're writing?
We are moms, so we’re in the habit of writing “while the kids are
at school” (although one of the kids has graduated!) between about ten and two
o’clock. If the words are flowing, we can write at a pace of about a chapter a
day.
4.
What would you say is
your interesting writing quirk?
Probably being cowriters! We write together in the same Google
document on two separate laptops, sitting side by side, wordlessly passing the
baton of who’s writing and who’s editing or reading back and forth between us.
By the time the book’s finished, neither one of us can remember who wrote what
(although we both like to claim credit for the funny parts)!
5.
How do books get
published?
A commercial fiction book like Trailbreaker is submitted to
editors at publishing houses by an agent. Our agents submitted the first book
in this series, Homemaker, to our editor at Thomas & Mercer, who
read it and liked it enough to recommend it to the rest of her editorial team
for acquisition. The other editors and team members read at least part of it
and agreed to acquire it, at which point we got an offer for Homemaker and
Trailbreaker from the editor. This got negotiated between editor and
agents, accepted, and then after a while there were contracts to negotiate and
sign. Then the editing process begins! We got revision notes from our editor
and from an independent developmental editor hired by Thomas and Mercer. The
book went through several rounds with them before it was sent for copyediting
and proofreading. Once it was proofread, the final page design and marketing
part began, and eventually the book released for readers to enjoy!
6.
Where do you get your
information or ideas for your books?
From everywhere! Writers love to pull information and ideas from
daily life, travel, the people we know, and the media we consume. We both enjoy
the mystery genre in books, streaming series, and true crime shows and
podcasts. Trailbreaker takes place in Door County, Wisconsin, which is a
peninsula that sticks out into Lake Michigan and has become a popular retreat
and tourist spot for people from far and wide. We happen to live right next
door to “the Door” and thought it would be fun to have Prairie Nightingale and
her team investigate a set of accidental deaths that their client thinks are
suspicious—but the police don’t, and the client herself is a bit of a
shady character!
7.
When did you write your
first book and how old were you?
Annie’s first book was called The HappyElephantus. She
wrote it in third grade, and her teacher worried that she’d plagiarized it
because it was such a good story! Ruthie wrote short fiction but didn’t draft a
complete novel until after she turned in a dissertation in British
history—technically her first book. Her first fiction book was a romance
novel set in Hawaii that didn’t have enough plot to be readable but taught her
a lot about how to make a story. She was thirty-one when she wrote it.
8.
What do you like to do
when you're not writing?
We have a busy family life with two kids, two cats, two miniature
dachshunds, and a few tanks of hermit crabs and fish. When we’re not writing,
Ruthie is a more-than-avid knitter and sweater designer, and we both enjoy reading
and podcasts.
9.
What does your family
think of your writing?
Our family is very supportive. Our kids don’t read our books, but
they do keep up with what we’re writing or thinking about writing. Ruthie’s
parents and extended family have been huge fans of the Prairie Nightingale
series.
10.
What was one of the most
surprising things you learned in creating your books?
We have been surprised by how much easier and more fun it is to
write with another person. It reminds us of when we were kids and we liked to
play “talking games” with other girls on the elementary school playground or
invent stories with our cousins—a kind of imaginary play that most people have
access to as children but don’t get to do as adults. If you’ve ever done acting
or played music with other people, you’re probably familiar with the way that
improvisation and creativity can be amplified in the space between people.
This is the joy of having a cowriter!
11.
How many books have you
written? Which is your favorite?
We’ve lost count! It’s somewhere around two dozen at this point if
you add up all of our books written separately and together. Every book we
write has its own story and personality, so it’s hard to name a “favorite”
unless it’s “whatever book we’re writing at the moment”—but the Prairie
Nightingale series has a special place in our hearts. Trailbreaker is
only the second in the series to be published, but we’ve written nine full
books. We really love these characters and this story world.
12.
Do you have any suggestions
to help me become a better writer? If so, what are they?
We like to encourage people to try cowriting, especially if they
struggle with perfectionism or self-doubt. When you’re making something with
another person, it’s much harder to let that gremlin of self-doubt win, because
you have to insult your own work and your cowriter’s. It’s also helpful
for getting past stuck places and blocks to have another person to generate
ideas or reframe challenges.
13.
Do you hear from your
readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
We love to hear from readers! We do get emails and direct messages
sometimes, usually from people who want to tell us that a story resonated with
their own life experiences or made them feel something powerful. That is the
very best kind of feedback to get. Writing is wonderful but can be a bit
lonely, and review culture tends to engage with novels on a binary of “was it
good or was it bad?” or “how many stars is it worth?” But this isn’t at all how
we read or how we think about stories—so we adore hearing from people who read
our books and want to tell us how they made them feel or what they made
them think about. The Prairie Nightingale series has a lot to say about
motherhood and community. These are topics that readers have a lot to say
about!
14.
What do you think makes
a good story?
Problems and feelings turn pages. The stakes need to be high
enough for readers to care, which means that a mystery needs both an intriguing
core problem and that readers enjoy seeing their sleuths navigate
escalating challenges as the story builds toward its conclusion—but a twisty
plot is only satisfying if the characters feel real, which requires a
certain amount of emotional verisimilitude and complexity.
15.
What would you like my
readers to know?
A reviewer recently said of Prairie Nightingale that “the thing
her former friends can’t forgive her for isn’t that she’s nosy, it’s that she’s
right—and Prairie being right about something being wrong has a tendency to
expose a whole lot of ugly secrets and dirty little lies that people around her
have been pretending not to notice” (Marlene Harris at Reading Reality). We love this as a summary of both Homemaker and the
central characteristic of Prairie as an investigator. She grew up on a commune,
and she believes in community. She loves people. She’s a women-centered,
justice-focused midwestern mom who’s constitutionally allergic to pretending not
to notice the ugly secrets and dirty little lies that prop up the worst of
the systems that hold people down—and if that sounds like a character you can
get behind, we’d love for you to give the series a try!
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