Judy Clemens

Stella Crown has been running her family’s dairy farm, Royalcrest Farm in rural Pennsylvania, since her widowed mother died when Stella was just 16. Life has been hard, and Stella has just been keeping it together wth the help of Howie Archer, a longtime farmhand to the Crown family, when she suddenly gets hit with a rash of accidents within days of her 29th birthday — so many that she soon realizes they aren’t accidents. For years, the oily real-estate developer Hubert Purcell has show more been hounding Stella to sell out. Has he — or someone else — decided to take things a step further?

Judy Clemens paints a dismal picture of the unrelenting drudgery and financial difficulties besetting family farms in the 21st century. But Stella is so hardened, so judgmental and so dismissive of anyone who isn’t pretty much exactly like her that readers — particularly urban or urbane ones — will find her extremely unlikable. Stella saves all of her compassion for her cows — and her father figure, Howie.

You’d expect Stella to be tough and independent to the point of taciturnity after more than a decade of the responsibility and endless toil of farm life; however, Stella’s so prickly that it’s no wonder that her childhood friend, Abie Granger, turns to a city girl named Missy for love. Who wants to romance a cactus? You know something’s wrong when you find yourself rooting for Missy over Stella!

Clemens saves Till the Cows Come Home from its unlikeable protagonist by providing a compelling mystery. The novel also serves as a pretty good primer on the hardships and insecurity of modern farm life. But, overall, the title’s much better than the novel, despite its being nominated for the Agatha Award for best new novel. Still, I’m intrigued enough to be willing to download the next novel in the series, Three Can Keep a Secret, from the library for another try. show less

In the sequel to Till the Cows Come Home, dairy farmer Stella Crown continues to mourn the loss of her father figure, Howie Archer, who served the Crown family as farm hand and friend for decades. Even grief-stricken, Stella realizes she cannot continue tending to her rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farm alone; therefore, she hires a pretty Mennonite widow, Lucy Lapp. The hardworking, quiet Lapp and her 8-year-old daughter Tess move onto Royalcrest Farm.

But is the solemn Lucy too good to show more be true? Soon Stella begins to have doubts about blushing and awkward Lucy due to an anonymous telephone call and some inconsistencies in Lucy’s story. Some nasty vandalism aimed at Lucy begins to make Stella wonder about Lucy’s old life. How was it that Lucy’s husband died? Were the circumstances as shady as the anonymous caller made out and was that what made Lucy flee Lancaster, Pennsylvania? Or could it be just a healthy desire to get away from her in-laws, particularly Lucy’s controlling fundamentalist father-in-law?

Meanwhile, Stella’s biker buddy Lenny Spruce fears something from his outlaw motorcycle past. Threats, attempted break-ins and worse convince Stella she needs to persuade him to reveal the truth. But Lenny continues to stubbornly keep his secrets, no matter how dangerous.

Stella continues pretty prickly, but, for some reason, I find Stella more tolerable than I did in the first book. Stella’s more forgiving of others, and she seems less judgmental here than she was in Till the Cows Come Home. While I found Stella abrasive and unlikable in the series’ debut, she proves herself a good friend to Lenny and a selfless friend to others.

Kudos to Judy Clemens for serving up a cup of the milk of human kindness to Stella. She — and the readers — are better off for it. show less

First Line: "So I said to him, 'You know what could happen if I pierced you there?' The stooge went white so fast I thought he was gonna do a face plant right there on the linoleum!"

Stella Crown lives in a Mennonite area of Pennsylvania and is a hard-working dairy farmer. She is also tattooed and rides a Harley Davidson motorcycle. She's used to be looked at with raised eyebrows; she's used to being treated as though she's from another planet.

Shortly before Christmas, Stella decides to treat show more herself to a new tattoo and stops in at Wolf Ink to have it done. Halfway through the tattoo, Wolf's wife Mandy calls him to the back of the shop, and while he's gone the hard-working Stella falls asleep in the chair. When she wakes up, Wolf and Mandy have disappeared. Although she's not happy about the interrupted tattoo, she's also very uneasy about the disappearance of her friends. When Stella discovers that Mandy has been found frozen to death behind a dumpster outside Wolf Ink and that Wolf has vanished, her overwhelming sense of guilt has her helping the police with their investigation. The investigation soon starts looking into fringe tattooists (who ink underage kids and "forget" to change needles) and a legislator who wants to close down the entire industry. Between milking times and blizzards, will Stella have a chance to find out who killed Mandy and what happened to Wolf?

I enjoy this series because Clemens has such a marvelous character in Stella and such an unusual setting. You may have sleuths who are tattooed and ride motorcycles, but chances are that they don't have to keep a dairy farm running. Many times amateur sleuths who are supposedly gainfully employed have time to gallivant over hill and dale day after day in pursuit of the bad guys. Stella doesn't. When those cows need milking, she has to be there. When the truck comes to pick up the milk, it has to be taken care of. This means that the mystery has to take a backseat from time to time for the daily work on a dairy farm. I like that realism.

I also like the fact that Clemens lets me take a peek into worlds that are very unfamiliar to me: the worlds of the Mennonites, of dairy farmers, of tattoo parlors, and of motorcycles. With a down-to-earth character like Stella showing me the way, it's a pleasure to ride along while she solves mysteries. show less

I am a long-time fan of Judy Clemens' other mystery series featuring tattooed dairy farmer Stella Crown, so I looked forward to reading this first in a new series. As I turned the pages, I enjoyed being immersed once more in Clemens' writing style, and I quickly warmed to her main character. Casey Maldonado is an extremely likeable-- and extremely sympathetic-- character. With such a tremendous tragedy in her life, you can't help but want things to turn the corner and start to go well for show more her. Even though she wants to be left alone to simmer away in her grief, she can't resist checking into the death of this beloved local woman.

Small town setting, pacing, story, characters... they're all good, as I've come to expect from this talented writer. Where the book fails, the responsibility falls on my own shoulders. I think I wanted Death to play a much more prominent role than he does. In this book he is pretty much surplus to requirements, off on the periphery eating a chicken leg, or behaving like a pesky housefly. With such a marginal presence, I found it very difficult to "buy into" Death as a character. What can I say? It's still a well-written story, and it should please most readers. Unfortunately, I'm the reader standing towards the back, with narrowed eyes and a skeptical expression. show less