Bernie Sanders and I stood at the end of the dock. Although the air was cool, the sky was cloudless and the sun was out. A perfect autumn day in Vermont. Most of the boats usually docked here were out on the water. A steady stream of out-of-state cars were rolling through town now. Some were driving slower than the speed limit so they could take in the leaves, while others were driving slower looking for parking for the fall festival, Champ Days. Most, presumably, hadn’t heard about the dead man who’d floated to the surface less than sixteen hours ago.
“Drowning pancakes in syrup is one thing,” Bernie said. “But a person drowning in syrup? How does that happen?”
I was just a congressional intern. Was the senator—my boss—really asking me to chime in on this? Sure, we were in my hometown, but Bernie and I had both read the same autopsy report on Mr. Fletcher, the victim. The medical examiner had laid out the facts, but the facts didn’t give us all the answers. Mr. Fletcher didn’t have anything else in his digestive tract besides maple syrup.
No pancakes.
No waffles.
Not even a spoonful of granola.
“You know what this looks like to me?” Bernie said. Then, without waiting for an answer: “A social media stunt gone wrong. One of those internet things, where kids are always doing dumb stuff on video and ending up in emergency rooms. This Fletcher fellow chugs a gallon of maple syrup for the camera, chokes on it, and falls off his boat.”
“Like a TikTok challenge,” I said. “Although I’d imagine Joey or the sheriff’s department went over all of Mr. Fletcher’s social media accounts already. If he had any. That has to be standard procedure in cases like this.”
“How much do you know about this Fletcher character?”
I gave Bernie a quick rundown on Mr. Fletcher: Single. No kids. Lived alone. He’d been the bank manager at the Savings & Loan for seven or eight years. Prior to that, he’d worked at a national bank branch in Massachusetts. I’d had checking and savings accounts at Eagle Creek, but only interacted with the tellers. Online banking wasn’t too popular in Eagle Creek. Vermonters valued that personal touch over cold, online chatbots. Although how much of an upgrade Mr. Fletcher was from a chatbot was debatable.
“The amateur sleuth in the Cannon Cove books has a saying,” Bernie mused. “This might be a small town, but there’s no such thing as a small murder.”
I almost choked on my own tongue. Neither of us had used the M-word, though surely it was on our minds. “We don’t know he was murdered,” I said. “He could have fallen into a barrel.”
“You’re talking about those fifty-five-gallon steel drums,” Bernie said. “The ones that are three, four foot high. They look like big kegs, right?”
“Reserve barrels,” I said. Every kid in Eagle Creek had taken at least half a dozen field trips to sugaring operations. If Bernie canned me, I could always become a maple syrup tour guide. “The bigger places stack them in warehouses, where they sit until they’re ready to release the syrup into production. Maybe he was, I don’t know, smuggling a barrel on his boat? And fell into it, choked to death, and landed with a splash in the lake.”
“Sounds a little Looney Tunes, doesn’t it?”
“I was bobbing for apples once in a trash can and lost my footing. Went straight in,” I said. “Took three people to pull me out.”
“Your folks must have been scared.”
“Um, yeah.” It had happened at a costume party last Halloween at Georgetown, but that was neither here nor there. “Back to the report,” I said. “It did note in one of the subsections that there were traces of syrup in his nose, his ears, and even his hair.”
“His hair,” Bernie repeated. “If you’re choking, how does it get in your hair?”
We would drive ourselves mad as two hatters going down various rabbit holes, trying to piece together a logical explanation for the strange details in the autopsy. It wasn’t up to Bernie and I to do any sleuthing—what we needed to do was pass it along to the State Police, who could investigate it properly.
“I could text my friend who works for the State Police,” I said, hoping this would put an end to Bernie’s interest in the case. If the senator’s name popped up in the news connected to a suspicious death, it wouldn’t just be the end of my internship—it would be the end of my political career. Perhaps, I thought, this is why interns weren’t routinely sent out to work field events alone.
To my relief, Bernie told me to go ahead and contact my friend. When I called him, however, Joey didn’t pick up. I left a vague message—I didn’t want a digital paper trail here.
Joey had said there were a dozen murders in the entire state every year. Most, I assumed, were on the mean streets of Burlington (population: forty thousand). But this was Eagle Creek. A town that was becoming more and more of a tourist town every year, as leaf peepers pushed farther and farther north in search of fall color. Violent crime didn’t happen here. It happened in places like Burlington and Boston and, yes, the nation’s capital. One murder and the leaf-peepers would flock off. Instead of tourists, we’d be overrun with teenagers from surrounding counties trying to spook each other. Beware the Maple Murderer of Eagle Creek . . .
On the surface, Eagle Creek was a picture-perfect small town. It had all the pieces: a general store, a library, a town hall. A county sheriff’s department to protect it all and keep order. It was all so postcard-perfect. There was comfort in the ordinary.
But there was nothing ordinary about Mr. Fletcher’s death.
Copyright 2022 Andrew Shaffer. Excerpted from Feel the Bern: A Bernie Sanders Mystery, published by Ten Speed Press (an imprint of Crown Publishing) and Penguin Random House Audio. All rights reserved.
FEEL THE BERN by Andrew Shaffer
Who knew fighting for a living wage could be so deadly? Bernie Sanders and his Gen Z intern are drawn into a murder investigation in a small Vermont town in this hilarious spin on cozy mysteries from the New York Times bestselling author of Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery.
Fall is bursting out all over Vermont, and while the rest of the Congress enjoys its recess, Senator Bernie Sanders has returned to his beloved home state for a weekend of events in Eagle Creek, “America’s #1 Leaf Peeping Destination.” It’s up to intern and Eagle Creek native Crash Robertson to keep the senator on schedule—and out of trouble.
Crash’s hopes for a quiet homecoming are dashed, however, when the lifeless body of a community banker with ties to “Big Maple” is found in Lake Champlain. While the sheriff’s department closes the case as an accident, a leaked autopsy indicates foul play…with a trail of syrup leading directly to one of the senator’s oldest friends. Bernie, taking a page from the cozy mysteries he’s addicted to, enlists Crash in a quest to uncover the killer’s true identity.
If Crash allows the senator to go too far off-script, it will be the end of her yet-to-begin political career. But as the suspect list grows to include a tech bro set on “disrupting” the maple syrup industry, struggling small-business owners, and even Crash’s own family, she realizes there’s more on the line than her own future. If the unlikely duo can’t solve the mystery of the Maple Murderer before they strike again, Bernie’s life-long fight for justice may come to an unplanned end.
This (totally fictional!) mystery also features recipes from Eagle Creek’s Vermont Country Shed, including Vermont Cheddar Mac & Cheese, “Feel the Bern!” Maple Sriracha Hot Sauce, and more!
Mystery Cozy [Ten Speed Press, On Sale: December 6, 2022, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781984861146 / ]
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About Andrew Shaffer
Andrew Shaffer is the New York Times bestselling author of Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery, the international bestselling parody Fifty Shames of Earl Grey, and over a dozen other humorous works of genre fiction from mystery to horror. He is a five-time Goodreads Choice Award nominee and a two-time finalist in the Humor category.
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