Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour for A Field Guide to Death and Deceit: A Harry & Emma Mystery – A Novel by Michelle L. Cullen. Stop by each blog on the tour for interviews, guest posts, spotlights, reviews and more!
A Field Guide to Death and Deceit: A Harry & Emma Mystery – A Novel by Michelle L. Cullen
A Field Guide to Death and Deceit: A Harry & Emma Mystery – A Novel
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Setting – Ohio
Publisher : Crooked Lane Books
Publication date : September 15, 2026
Print length : 336 pages
Hardcover
Widower and anthropologist Harry Lancaster and his Gen Z colleague Emma are back for more murder and mayhem when they stumble upon a dead farmer.
This delightful sequel to A Field Guide to Murder is perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Benjamin Stevenson.
When an odd request leads Harry Lancaster to agree to meet his former sweetheart Willow at a farm on the outskirts of town, Emma’s suspicions run high, and she insists on joining him. Instead of Willow greeting them when they arrive, they discover the farm’s owner dead, with a corn rake embedded in his back.
After being interrogated by the police, Harry and Emma return to his home to find a bereft Willow, who admits she lost her life savings in a real estate scam involving the farm. Worried Willow will become the main murder suspect, Harry decides to help her, despite Emma’s concerns.
To bring the swindlers—and murderer—to justice, Harry recruits his potentially shady, financial-whiz brother and a neighborhood teenage hacker. Then Willow’s realtor is declared missing, and Harry’s brother is caught up in the fray.
As Harry, Emma, and team unearth clues, they increasingly dodge the police, stalkers, and danger in their race to save Willow and Harry’s brother before anyone else turns up dead.
Character Guest Post: Harry Lancaster
What Anthropology Taught Me About Solving Crimes
By Harry Lancaster, PhD
I’ve spent nearly five decades doing work that has taken me to refugee camps, conflict zones, and vulnerable communities around the world. I’ve sat across tables from government leaders, subsistence farmers, community visionaries, and rebels determined to win at any price. I’ve witnessed the aftermath of unimaginable violence and seen the hope and joy that somehow survives despite terrible tragedies. What I didn’t realize at the time was that all of it — every field interview, every tense negotiation, every moment of bearing witness to the best and worst of human behavior — was also a masterclass in detection.
A lot of the skills I learned that made me a good anthropologist have also made me good at investigating murder.
The Details Are Never Just Details
A critical part of my fieldwork was noticing things that most people miss. How someone enters a room. Where they choose to sit. Who speaks first, and who defers. While I speak eight languages fluently, sometimes in the field I had to rely on interpreters, which forced me to understand communication beyond words — to read body language, tone, hesitation, nervous tics, the rabbit holes a conversation takes when someone is steering you away from something. I became attuned not just to what was said, but to what wasn’t, and to what might be significant about the gap between the two.
This is also what detection requires. Every detail at a crime scene is a clue to something larger. An anthropologist looks at the contents of a purse and can tell you about a person’s social structure, economic status, and belief system. A detective looks at that same purse and finds a window into the victim’s life — and quite possibly, their death.
Context Is Everything
Anthropologists are trained to ask a particular kind of question: why does this object exist in this form, in this place, used in this way, at this time? It sounds deceptively simple. It is not. It requires resisting the very human urge to impose a familiar framework onto something unfamiliar and instead letting the evidence tell you what it means on its own terms.
Crime scenes demand the same discipline. Rush to a conclusion and you’ll miss the thing that changes everything. I learned this lesson in the field long before I ever found myself investigating murder.
The World Is Rarely Black and White
Perhaps the most important thing fieldwork has taught me was to suspend judgment. The history behind violence is almost never a clean story of victims and villains. More often, it’s a conflation of the two, shaped by forces that stretch back for generations. Holding that complexity without collapsing it into something simpler is uncomfortable. It is also essential.
Good detection works the same way. The obvious suspect is not always the guilty one. The sympathetic victim is not always innocent. If you allow yourself to see only what confirms your initial read, you will miss what actually happened. I’ve learned to sit with ambiguity longer than is comfortable, and to resist the pull toward a tidy narrative until the evidence earns it.
Moving Between Worlds
Over the course of my career, I’ve had to build trust with an extraordinarily wide range of people under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Each conversation required a different approach, a different way of making someone feel safe enough to speak honestly. There is no single technique for this. It requires reading the person in front of you and adjusting in real time.
A detective needs this flexibility too. Witnesses and suspects don’t all respond to the same approach. The ability to meet people where they are — to make them feel genuinely seen and heard — is not a soft skill. It is, in my experience, one of the sharpest tools available.
Trust Your Instincts
If I’ve learned anything across my nearly five decades of fieldwork, it’s that your instincts are not separate from your analysis — they are your analysis, running faster than conscious thought. Your brain is constantly processing information beyond your immediate focus, and when it detects something wrong, it tells your body before it tells your mind. The twinge in the gut. The hair rising on the back of the neck. The involuntary shiver.
I have learned to listen to these signals without question. They have, on more than one occasion, kept me alive.
So it’s all of these skills that make me feel confident that if my colleague and friend Emma Stockton and I stumble upon another murder in the future, we’ll be well equipped to solve it.
Harry Lancaster, PhD is a retired anthropologist and widower who lives in Westerly, Ohio. He may, at times, use binoculars to observe his neighbors. He would never use them, however, to look into his neighbors’ windows, but he figures anything outside is fair game.
About Michelle L. Cullen
Michelle L. Cullen has lived and traveled all over the world, from working as a bilingual secretary in Paris to backpacking around Europe, Central America, and Southern Africa to helping rebuild communities after war throughout Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific — where she saw the best and worst of human behavior. Her lifelong fascination with people and why they do what they do, was further fueled by her academic training. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics’ Sociology Department and her master’s degree in anthropology from Melbourne University in Australia.
A fan of adventure, she has a black belt in Taekwondo, has summited 900 feet rock climbing, snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef, and hiked up an active volcano. She currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland, where she’s either doing yoga, playing outside, or plotting murder. She’s a proud member of International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and The Authors Guide, and has been gleefully reading and watching murder mysteries since the age of ten.
Author Links
- Website: https://mlcullen.com/
- Newsletters: https://michelle-l-cullen.kit.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MichelleLCullenAuthor/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michellelcullen/
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/55985912.Michelle_L_Cullen
Purchase Links: Amazon – PenguinRandomHouse – Barnes & Noble – Books A Million – Bookshop.org – Hudson Booksellers – Target – Walmart
Enter the Giveaway
A Field Guide to Death and Deceit TOUR PARTICIPANTS
July 13 – Storybook Lady – REVIEW, AUTHOR GUEST POST
July 14 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT
July 15 – Romance Novel Giveaways – AUTHOR GUEST POST
July 16 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – CHARACTER GUEST POST
July 17 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
July 18 – Socrates Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
July 19 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
July 20 – Sarandipity’s – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
July 20 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
July 21 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW
July 22 – Salty Inspirations – AUTHOR GUEST POST
July 23 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – REVIEW
July 24 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER GUEST POST
July 25 – Reading Is My SuperPower – REVIEW
July 26 – Cozy Up With Kathy – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
July 27 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading Books – SPOTLIGHT
Have you signed up to be a Tour Host?
Click Here to Find Details and Sign Up Today!
Want to Book a Tour?
Click Here