The Pea Soup Poisonings

The Northern Spy Club #1

by Nancy Means Wright

Zoe Elwood's know-it-all brother Kelby has started the Northern Spy Club-named after a variety of apple in their father's Vermont orchard-and declared himself President. To get into the club one must walk a narrow beam over rusted farm machinery, and solve a crime. In this case, the crime involves Alice Fairweather's grandmother, who has expired after eating a bowl of pea soup. According to Kelby, the elderly Bagley Sisters across the street who made the soup must be guilty. But Zoe is fond of the Bagley Sisters and asks her friend Spencer to help her uncover clues that will prove the sisters are innocent. Solving the crime and walking the high beam in the barn are something that Zoe is determined to prove a girl can do just as well as a boy.

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2006

About the author

I'm the author of 18 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, including 5 mystery novels from St. Martin's Press, 2 historical novels: Midnight Fires: a Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft ('10)and the Nightmare ('11)from Perseverance Press.For those who don't know her, Wollstonecraft is the brilliant but rebellious and conflicted 18th century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,and mother of Mary Shelley (think Frankenstein).
I've also published 2 mysteries for kids. The Pea Soup Poisonings, based on my own 4 kids'childhood shenanigans, won the '06 Agatha Award for Best Children's/YA Novel,and The Great Circus Train Robbery was a finalist. My latest mystery is Broken Strings, a spin-off from my St. Martin's Press novels with a puppeteer sleuth, and a novel, Walking up into the Wild for "tweens" (ages 10-14, set in 18th-century Vermont just before the end of the American Revolution. It's both suspenseful and romantic and based on family history. Not a mystery.
I've published poems and short fiction for Redbook, Seventeen, American Literary Review,Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and many literary journals and anthologies (Beacon Press, Ashland Poetry Press, Univ of Illinois Press, et al.).
A longtime actress & director,I'm a former Bread Loaf Scholar and Scholar for the Vermont Humanities Council. I live with my spouse and 2 Maine Coon cats in bucolic Middlebury, Vermont. "Becoming Mary Wollstonecraft" Facebook page.