Rhys Bowen — readers who love the Molly Murphy series for its fierce, self-reliant protagonist navigating a world stacked against her — often alone, often in physical danger, always refusing to be smaller than the situation requires — will recognize something essential in Delores Bailey from the very first chapter.
Anna Lee Huber — if you’re drawn to historical mysteries where the detective’s outsider status is part of the story rather than just a plot device — where being a woman in a man’s world creates the tension rather than simply providing the backdrop — the Lady Darby series and the Moonshiner Mysteries are working the same territory from different ends of the era.
Margaret Coel — for readers who come to historical mystery for an immersive sense of place — not just period detail, but landscape, weather, the specific texture of a remote community — Coel’s Wind River mysteries and Big Sky Murder share a commitment to the American West as a living, pressurized environment where the land itself shapes what’s possible.
Where Delores came from Delores Bailey began life as a secondary character in the Bootleggers’ Chronicles — appearing first in Tasting the Apple and growing through Best Served Cold until she was clearly a woman with more story to tell than the Philadelphia series could contain. The Moonshiner Mysteries are what happened when a character refused to stay secondary.
She was inspired by the real women of the 1920s who carved out lives on their own terms in the cracks of a world that wasn’t designed for them — not glamorous speakeasy fixtures, but women doing hard, dangerous work in isolated places, answerable to no one because no one was looking out for them either.
Gold mining in Montana’s Tobacco Root Mountains Pony Gulch is drawn from the real town of Pony, Montana, a gold-mining community in the Tobacco Root Mountains that had its heyday in the 1880s and lingered into the 1920s as the easier claims played out. Sherilyn Decter worked with residents of the real Pony — members of the Pony Homecoming Club and the Montana Historical Society, as well as geologists Chris Mancuso and Cliff Porter — to build a landscape that functions as more than backdrop. The mining camps Delores supplies on her route, the roads that test her truck’s brakes on every run, the particular quality of silence in those mountains at night — all of it is grounded in what that place actually was.
Texas Hold ‘Em Poker One of the more unexpected research detours in writing Big Sky Murder was poker — specifically the psychology and strategy of Texas Hold ‘Em, which features in a pivotal scene. Sherilyn Decter read widely on the subject, including the account of a psychology professor who taught herself to play and then trained under a world-class poker player. The scene required understanding not just the mechanics of the game but the way skilled players read and mislead each other — which, it turns out, has a great deal in common with how a good investigator thinks.
Charlie Chaplin — the imaginary companion Charlie Chaplin arrived in Delores’s head when she was a lonely girl sneaking into Philadelphia movie theaters to escape a brutal home life. His screen persona — always falling down, always getting back up, making the audience laugh at things that should be unbearable — was exactly the company a girl like Delores needed. He is not a ghost or a supernatural presence. He is what the mind does when it needs someone to talk to and there is no one safe enough to trust.
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was a real figure: English actor, filmmaker, composer, and the most famous screen presence of the silent film era. Sherilyn Decter has watched all of his films — silent and sound — and threads period-accurate details about his life and work into every book in the series. Charlie only ever knows what Delores knows, which requires careful attention: he cannot reference films she hasn’t seen, events she wouldn’t have heard of, or a version of himself that exists beyond the pages of her movie magazines.
Big Sky Murder is the first book in the Moonshiner Mysteries. Explore the full series.
Delores Bailey first appears in Books Two and Three of the Bootleggers’ Chronicles, set in Philadelphia — but you don’t need to have read those books first. Everything you need is here.
And if the silver wolf riding in the truck bed has already caught your attention — Lash, a free novella for newsletter subscribers, tells his story from the beginning.
