by: Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare
Series: Prairie Nightingale
Genre: Mystery with Romantic Elements
Release Date: June 1, 2025
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
When a former friend and devoted mother vanishes, a confident homemaker turned amateur sleuth follows an unexpected trail of scandals and secrets to find her.
Prairie Nightingale is both the midlife mother of two teenage girls and a canny entrepreneur who has turned homemaking into a salaried profession. She’s also fascinated with the gritty details of other people’s lives. So when seemingly perfect Lisa Radcliffe, a member of her former mom-friends circle, suddenly disappears, it’s in Prairie’s nature to find out why.
Given her innate talent for vital pattern recognition, Prairie is out to catch a few clues by taking a long, hard look at everyone in Lisa’s life—and uncovering their secrets. Including Lisa’s. Prairie’s dogged curiosity is especially irritating to FBI agent Foster Rosemare, the first interesting man Prairie has met since her divorce. His square jaw and sharp suits don’t hurt.
But even as the investigation begins to wreak havoc on Prairie’s carefully tended homelife, she’s resolved to use her multivalent homemaking skills to solve the mystery of a missing mom—and along the way discover the thrill of her new sleuthing ambitions.
Chapter 1
Prairie Nightingale stood on her tiptoes, ignoring the incessant buzz of her phone in the back pocket of her jeans and craning for a better look at Amber Jenkins.
“What do you think of Mrs. Jenkins’s handbag?” she asked her daughter Anabel.
Prairie and Anabel were part of a loose congregation of parents and family members milling around on the paved playground of the K–8 gifted school, waiting for the final release bell. Prairie hated moments like these, when there was a measurable stretch of time but nothing happening and no way to get anything done. An article she’d once read called it “garbage time.” When she was going through her divorce, she’d found a lot of articles like that—about how women’s time was wasted and their labor undervalued—as she tried to understand why the world believed she’d spent her seventeen years as a wife and mother doing essentially nothing.
“I don’t think of Mrs. Jenkins’s handbag.” Anabel looked away from her phone long enough to flick her eyes over to the purse in question. “But if you’re asking me how much it cost, that’s a seven-hundred-dollar bag. Nine, if it’s from this year.”
“Huh.” Prairie watched Amber, whose gaze was fixed in the middle distance as she arranged her ripple of blond hair over one shoulder. Bearing up under her own garbage time. Amber had two kids, like Prairie. She was sharp and irreverent, with a slightly faded tattoo of koi circling a lotus blossom on her shoulder. Once, she’d been Prairie’s favorite among a group of women who went for coffee after school drop-off and got together to make swag bags for the teachers. Prairie had always thought she and Amber had a genuine connection as the two moms in the group without a prestigious education. Both of them knew how to keep track of the drink orders from a ten top.
“Remember a couple of weeks ago when Mrs. Jenkins backed into that Dodge Ram and smashed her taillight?” Prairie asked Anabel.
“No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Her daughter’s dry tone failed to disguise a hint of interest. She was not immune to what some called Prairie’s nosiness and what Prairie called her talent at vital pattern recognition.
“Well, that happened. And look.” Prairie angled her head at a dirty black Escalade illegally parked across from the school. “The taillight is still busted.”
“So?”
“Who spends nine hundred dollars on a new handbag and doesn’t get their taillight fixed?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that?” Anabel squinted in Amber’s direction. “Didn’t she used to carry a Kitty Blue purse?”
“That’s right! The metallic blue crossbody bag with the cat ears. And Kitty Blue is not high dollar.” Prairie had never bought anything from the faddish direct-to-consumer brand, but she was familiar from seeing it hyped on the social media channels of practically every woman she’d ever met. “An upgrade like that begs a lot of questions.”
“Not really. Lots of things could explain it. Maybe someone bought her this new purse because her Kitty Blue one started getting ratty. Or the people who fix cars are too busy. Why do you even care?”
“It’s just something to keep me occupied while we wait for your sister,” Prairie said. “I don’t really care.”
This was a lie. Prairie did care, in the way that you couldn’t help caring about people you’d known for your children’s entire lives who didn’t talk to you anymore and had blocked you from the group chat for reasons you understood but didn’t agree with.
It wasn’t Prairie’s fault. At least, she didn’t think so. She blamed Dr. Carmichael. Nathan Carmichael had been a popular local ob-gyn until Prairie found out—via an investigation that began when he failed to deliver an anticipated donation to the PTO the year she was fundraising chair—that the doctor was serially abusing his patients. She couldn’t let it go, and didn’t let it go, until there was nowhere for Nathan Carmichael to go but prison.
It caused a scandal. Green Bay was not a big town, in population or in generosity of spirit. The doctor’s wife, who had been part of Prairie’s friend group, had to resign her seat as a state senator and move away with her kids to weather the gossip. Prairie’s role in the unpleasantness did not go unnoticed.
She was shunned. Cast out. Politely, Midwest-nice ghosted.
Although, in truth, she had never been completely clear on whether she lost almost all her friends because she was a dog with a bone about Nathan Carmichael or because she’d pulled the trigger on her divorce. Everyone liked Greg, her ex. In fact, Prairie liked Greg, her ex. He was, as the women in her life had never failed to remind her, one of the good ones.
But she could have approval, or she could live free and do as she liked. When Prairie felt sad about the friends she’d lost getting to the bottom of the mystery, she looked at the picture she’d saved on her phone of Nathan Carmichael crying in a courtroom. When she felt sad about the friends she’d lost because of her divorce, she let herself feel sad.
Her conscience was clear.
“Will you deal with your phone already, Mom? The sound of your notifications literally gives me nausea.”
“I’m going to go talk to her.” Prairie adjusted the well-worn messenger bag on her hip and grabbed her daughter’s forearm. “Come with me.”
“Oh my God.” Anabel squared her shoulders and bent her knees. “Please don’t make your nemesis talk to you.”
Prairie ignored the inaccurate label. “Nemesis” was a rarefied and mutual relationship of jealous hostility, whereas Prairie had nothing against Amber Jenkins. If she did have a nemesis, it would be her US congressional representative, who’d once called her “hysterical” in response to a letter she sent him about his abysmal comments on gay marriage.
“It will only take a minute,” she told Anabel. “We can’t just stand here waiting for your sister. Maelynn’s always the last one out.”
“If you make me do this, you have to drive us through Firetta’s for breakfast tomorrow.”
Prairie narrowed her eyes at Anabel. “Deal.”
“And you’ll turn off the monitoring app on my socials.”
“Never.”
Now Anabel narrowed her eyes. “One day a week, you let me wear slippers as shoes to school.”
Prairie sighed. “Fine. But you have to participate in the conversation.”
With Anabel close behind her, Prairie dodged and wove her way through the other school-pickup parents—the lone dads and grandmothers with their heads bent over their phones, the clumps of moms complaining about the parking situation and enjoying the anemic sunlight of a forty-five-degree afternoon that everyone could agree was “pretty good for April in Wisconsin.”
“It’s not too late to not do this,” Anabel said as they drew close. “I’ll even take our deal off the table. I do love you, and I’m invested in your long-term survival.”
Prairie lifted an arm in a friendly wave. “Amber!”
The other woman mostly succeeded in hiding her surprise at Prairie’s approach. It was a social convention that every mom had to at least pretend to be friends with all the other moms, and Prairie was using that convention to her advantage. Amber seemed to know this, given how she was frozen in place and her smile was close lipped.
“Prairie,” Amber said once it was obvious she could not escape. “How tall is Anabel getting? Sophomore?”
“Freshman,” Anabel answered dutifully.
Amber smiled genuinely at Prairie’s daughter. She wasn’t a bad person, just hampered by Prairie’s status as a pariah. “You look just like your mom these days. All that shiny brown hair and dimples—I bet everyone tells you that.”
Anabel smoothed her palms over the shiny brown hair in question. Even if she buzzed it off, she couldn’t avoid being told she looked like her mother’s copy-paste. In addition to her hair, Prairie had given Anabel her dimples, an excellent nose, and expressive eyebrows that made Anabel’s desire to lightly maim her mother for making her talk to Amber Jenkins more than clear.
“Did you end up at Ashwaubenon for high school?” Amber asked.
“No, East.”
“Really? How’s the transition going?”
Prairie stepped forward, playing defense against Amber’s attempt to make this conversation all about Anabel. “Listen, I was thinking about you the other day, because wasn’t it you who told me about a great garage where you take your car? Some under-the-radar place, super reasonable on prices?”
The school bell rang. Amber shook her head, pretending to focus her attention beyond Prairie to where kids were beginning to emerge from the double side doors. “That must have been someone else.”
“I could’ve sworn it was you.”
Amber’s son broke away from the scrum of children in his usual disarray, his coat dangling from one elbow, the sleeve dragging in the dirty slush. Her mouth compressed a fraction. “No, it couldn’t have been,” she said. “We’re leasing, so we have to take it to the dealership.” She adjusted her purse strap in preparation to escape. “Anyway, there’s Grayson, so—”
“Amber!” Prairie chirped in false surprise. “Dang, girl! Look at your purse!” Beside her, Anabel stiffened in horror.
Prairie understood. She was internally wincing herself, because she was not, even with a few drinks in her, someone who could pull off a Dang, girl! Opposite. She was a white woman who’d grown up in a cohousing community outside of Portland, Oregon, in the nineties. But she was also running out of time, and Amber needed to accept this olive branch quickly and answer her questions. “I’m dead of jealousy. Where did you buy it?”
Amber folded her arm protectively over the buttery soft, ostrich-embossed leather of her new purse. “To be honest, I didn’t. I went to one of those swap nights with friends. I had a few Coach bags I hadn’t used in forever, so I traded up.”
The hairs on the back of Prairie’s neck stood up. Nope. She ignored Anabel’s sharp elbow nudge and how Amber’s son was circling her, trying to shove some paper in her face to sign. “That’s so lucky! I have literally never been that lucky at a swap. You must feel so smug.”
Amber gave her a half smile and a half shrug that obviously meant Oh my God, go away, Prairie. She took the paper her son was trying to give her, ran her eyes over it, and pulled her phone out of her impossible purse.
Amber’s phone was at least three models out of date and had a cracked screen.
She and Amber had once compared the new phones they’d both purchased the first moment they became available, eager to learn all their ways. Prairie’s current phone, humming softly with incoming notifications in her back pocket, was three weeks old, had cost as much as a full mortgage payment, and came equipped with a protection plan that would replace the screen overnight even if she deliberately smashed it just to feel her own power.
Amber hovered her phone over the paper, swiped the screen a few times, and handed the note back to her son. “Go run that over to recycling. I just e-signed it and turned it in.” She slid the phone back into her purse. Prairie watched it notch into a well-appointed purse organizer before Amber closed the flap.
“There’s Maelynn,” Anabel practically shouted. She pulled at Prairie’s arm.
“Oh, you better go. It looks like Maelynn needs a hand. It was nice catching up with you.”
Prairie glanced over at her younger daughter, exiting the school doors with her backpack, trumpet, and a Sterilite of supplies for her science project. Not a strand of Maelynn’s wavy auburn hair was out of place. She wouldn’t have let Prairie carry or touch any of her stuff if a hurricane blew in. “Listen—”
But Amber had already started to scurry away, the wind ruffling her hair just enough to show off the stoplight-red streaks at her nape.
“Wait!” Prairie called, out of chances but unable to help herself. “You didn’t tell me, and I’m dying to know. Who brought that fabulous bag to the swap? I might pester her for deets.”
“Jesus, Mom. Jesus.” Anabel didn’t even try to keep that under her breath.
“Um, Lisa. It was Lisa’s.”
“Lisa Radcliffe or Lisa Preet? Or did you mean Lisa Van Der Perren?”
Five feet away now, Amber looked fully panicked. “Radcliffe. Lisa Radcliffe. I really have to run. See you!” She turned and waved over her shoulder, but she didn’t look back.
Prairie poked Anabel’s upper arm as they turned to meet Maelynn. “No. No way.”
“Mom. Stop.”
She did stop, but only because her eleven-year-old daughter had completed a mincing circuit of a puddle and come to a stop at Prairie’s elbow. “Hey, Mom. Hey, Anabel.” Maelynn had zipped her black puffer coat all the way to the top, which made her skin look like skim milk and brought out the freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Hey, Peanut. You have a good day?”
“Yeah. Can we go by a craft store on the way home? I need poster board. I’m supposed to make a presentation for my special education teacher about strategies to overcome sensory overwhelm. It’s a terrible assignment. What if I told you to overcome being cold when it’s freezing outside? What is your strategy for overcoming the need to breathe in those jeans you made me help you zip up that you can’t even sit down in?”
“They had just come out of the dryer, and they still fit, but carry on,” Prairie said.
“I’m changing the assignment. I’m going to make a poster about how sensory differences in autistic people cause trauma if they’re not accommodated. So will you stop at the craft store?”
Prairie smiled at Maelynn, whose fierce, stormy expression melted her heart like it always had. “I have poster board. White, black, and I think there’s still a blue and a couple hot pink. Stick-on letters in black and gold.”
Maelynn nodded. “Okay. We can go home, then.”
Prairie caught Anabel’s eye and arched one brow. “There is zero possibility she got that bag from Lisa Radcliffe at a swap night. You know I’m right.”
Maelynn looked around until she located the car. She began walking in that direction. Anabel trailed after her, sliding her finger over the screen of her phone and navigating by peripheral vision.
“The phone and the taillight don’t add up,” Prairie mused. “They don’t go with a nine-hundred-dollar purse.”
“That she traded for at a mom flea market.”
Prairie waved her hand in dismissal. “Everybody brings trash to those swap meets. If they have anything good, they sell it on Facebook Marketplace or put it out on consignment. Also, you have to stop trying to make things sound unimportant by adjectifying them with the word ‘mom.’ It’s sexist.”
“‘Adjectifying’ is not a word.” Maelynn was carefully placing her trumpet case in the trunk of the car in a foam box she had ordered on the internet with her children’s Mastercard. Anabel threw herself into the front seat.
Prairie’s phone started to ring. She slid it out of her jeans pocket as she dropped into the driver’s seat of her zippy little Honda. “I need a few minutes for work.”
They knew the drill. Anabel pulled out her AirPods. Maelynn situated herself in the back, unzipping her schoolbag and retrieving her lap desk from the back seat organizer. Prairie unlocked her phone, reveling in the pleasant tingles that sluiced from the top of her scalp down to her lower back.
It hadn’t always been like this. Before the divorce, when Greg was constantly working and often forgot to come home for dinner—when he was too tired to help with the housework but nonetheless relied on Prairie to gently midwife him through the labor of processing his day—it got to the point where she didn’t want to look at her phone lest she discover one more thing to keep track of. One more job to do.
But all that had changed. Not because she’d gotten a divorce, but because now she earned a salary.
When Prairie asked for a separation five years ago, after she and Greg had tried both couples therapy and marriage counseling, their shared therapist had advised Prairie to start thinking about “next steps.” What she meant was that Prairie hadn’t gone to college. She’d left the cohousing community where she grew up for Seattle, supporting herself by working a string of unskilled service jobs. Then Anabel was born, and she’d abandoned the workforce entirely. Regardless of the financial agreements that came with the divorce, in the long term, Prairie would require an income, and finding someone willing to hire her wouldn’t be easy. She’d need a plan.
At first, Prairie had acknowledged the therapist’s point. This was something she should think about.
Then she thought about it and got angrier than she’d ever been in her life.
Greg Ozmanski, her ex-husband, whom she’d met when he was a poor graduate student who sometimes put on two different shoes in the morning, was, at present, the founder and co-owner of an embarrassingly lucrative institutional software development firm that had started in a two-hundred-square-foot office that smelled like mouse.
Prairie was not the other co-owner.
She was not, even though she was the one who’d coaxed and cozened him through his dissertation work. Even though it was Prairie who took on extra shifts as a barista and a waitress so Greg could focus on internships and a string of poorly paid jobs at start-ups, and Prairie whose tips covered the rent and utilities so Greg could funnel his salary into buying ground-floor tech stock. She picked out his snappy wardrobe for interviews. She went with him to investor events and fluently conversed with rich white men about rounds of financing and what the digital future anticipated for business and how it was that her husband was uniquely positioned to meet those needs.
When Prairie was pregnant and Greg moved them across the country to his hometown for a job he’d accepted over the phone without telling her first, she was the one who pretended it was fine, even as she’d been reluctant to move so far from her parents. Even as she missed the Olympic Mountains and Pacific Ocean and felt like a literal fish out of water in the Midwest.
She provided twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week care for Anabel and, later, for Maelynn. She couldn’t earn more than childcare cost, and Greg worked eighteen-hour days, so she made a home for him and their children. She entertained his colleagues and clients. She made everything work.
Prairie gave Greg Ozmanski the patina of a brilliant family man, and he used her skills, her intuition, and her emotional intelligence. He used her flexibility, her organization, and her detail orientation. He used her labor, her time, her ideas, her support, her patience, her body, turning them into reputation and work that paid him money and paid other people money but paid Prairie nothing.
Because the work Greg did was work.
The work Prairie did was not.
That was when Prairie had decided she didn’t want alimony and a document splitting their marital assets. She had been working for seventeen years gaining complex and monetizable experience alongside breathtakingly refined soft skills. She wanted what she’d earned.
She wanted the credit.
And so, instead of a traditional division of assets when they finalized their divorce a little more than two years ago, Prairie had instructed their lawyer to establish a trust, in which she and Greg were partners, though she had all the day-to-day decision-making power. With the trust’s money, she hired a staff, who were paid fair and equitable wages to handle everything that had always gone into her successful household—and Prairie was the CEO.
She could admit it was an experiment, or, really, a statement. It wasn’t forever. But she liked her life so much better as CEO of the 724 Maple Project. She even had business cards. prairie nightingale, homemaker.
Prairie fucking loved those business cards.
She tackled her notifications in the order of their arrival. First, an email from Greg with the figure she needed to complete his tax interview. She pulled up the interview doc, filled in the number, and submitted it electronically to the accountant’s firm through its online portal.
Next, three news notifications, which she whipped through quickly. The zoo had started offering themed parties and overnight experiences for kids. She set a reminder to look at the website later in case it might be something Maelynn would want to do for her next birthday.
The president’s chief of staff had forced an aide to sign an NDA. Sex monster. File under Men Are Trash.
The Green Bay chief of police would be giving a statement asking for the public’s assistance with an urgent matter at four thirty. File under Please and Thank You and Bookmark.
Greg had left a voicemail and sent a text to let her know he’d sent her the email. She texted him back, This kind of behavior is why we got divorced.
He replied, Whatever it takes to get your attention. Followed by a praise-hands emoji. Followed by the smiley face with hearts for eyes.
Prairie’s lips twitched, and the dimple in her right cheek started to sink.
You’re trying not to smile, he wrote. Send me a selfie so I can see.
She lifted her stylus, let it hover over the screen for a moment, and blocked him.
Was she completely immune to Greg Ozmanski’s geeky charms? No. She had built a life with him and made two perfect daughters. She’d had her reasons for falling in love with him when she was a mere dimpled, shiny-haired child.
But when her heart had broken at the end of their marriage, it hadn’t gone back together the same way. There were pieces of it that would always belong to Greg. The rest had mended themselves for some unknown something else that she hadn’t put her finger on yet.
Whatever it was, it was going to be big, important, and challenging and would make the world better for her children.
Prairie was reviewing a list of substitutions the grocery shopper had made when Anabel took out one AirPod. “Did you just block Dad?”
“Maybe.”
“He says to unblock him because he wants to tell you something.”
Prairie started the car. “Tell him I’ll think about it.”
“You know, this is what that one divorce movie said you weren’t supposed to do. I believe it was in the part called ‘Don’t Make Your Kid a Messenger for Your Bullshit.’”
“It was called Kids in the Middle,” Maelynn said from the back seat. “And you’re not supposed to say ‘bullshit.’”
“According to Mom, there are no bad words, only strong words,” Anabel replied. “Dad says he’ll see you soon.”
“He’s coming for dinner?” Prairie signaled left and turned onto the broad two-lane toward home.
“He’s already at the house.”
Prairie sighed, pulling away into traffic. “Fuck.”
But she mouthed the strong word. Because she was a good mother.
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The Prairie Nightingale Series:
Trailbreaker (Book 2) releases February 3, 2026
Places to find Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare:
Website | Facebook - Ruthie | Facebook - Annie | Instagram - Ruthie | Instagram - Annie | Goodreads - Ruthie | Goodreads - Annie | Amazon Author Page - Ruthie | Amazon Author Page - Annie
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