Violet Temple Pulls the Oh Crap Strap: An Alaskan Menopausal Mystery (The Alaskan Menopausal Mystery Series)

If Violet Temple has learned anything in her almost 60 years, it's how to set a boundary.

Well, she's trying anyway. When Kyle Garner and Josh Albans ask to rent kayaks from her Juneau, Alaska guiding business, she says no. After all, they want to paddle to Egret Island, which is both impossible (due to the famously wild waters in Southeast Alaska) and pointless (there's nothing on the island, save a decrepit fox farm).

But apparently there's more to the island than meets the eye. A ragtag bunch of former residents. A few ratty fox pelts. Ample tall tales about life on the edges of society. And maybe the missing work of 1950s mega-famous romance novelist Dierdre St. Claire, which is rumored to be stashed with a hermit she had an affair with decades earlier. Kyle, St. Claire's spurned heir, believes not only in the mystery manuscript but also in its value on the market. After immersing himself in the online manosphere, he's pretty sure he deserves control of St. Claire's legacy. The parts that will make him money, anyway. And he's letting no one stop him. Not Josh Albans. Surely not Violet Temple.

What's a menopausal woman to do when a clueless young man threatens her business and her new-found friends? And tries to steal the work of a legend? Violet's about to show all the people who don't see her what she's really made of.

Marie Ryan McMillan’s writing sweet spot is examining what it means for women to age in and near the wilderness (probably because that’s what she’s doing right now). Her short stories have appeared in Barren Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, Passagers, Cirque, and Tidal Echoes. She was also a columnist for the Juneau Empire, and her non-fiction has been published in Edutopia and Teaching K-8 Magazine. She lives and works in Juneau, Alaska, with her husband where they welcome home their adult daughter as often as possible and hike even when it’s raining.