The Clued in Mystery interpretation of Author, Author is back, with all new panelists. Brook and Sarah are joined by Reagan Davis, Colleen Cambridge, and Manon Woghan (Mystery Manon) for mystery fun and games.
Discussed and mentioned
Author, Author featuring Ellery Queen
Related episodes
Clued In Conundrums 1 (October 7, 2025)
Clued in Conundrums 2 (January 13, 2026)
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah. I’m so excited for another round of clued in conundrums and basically for the ah excuse to hang out with some really great friends. |
| Sarah | This is going to be so much fun. So before we introduce our friends, let me just introduce the premise of what we’re doing. So when ah we were researching our Ellery Queen episode from a few seasons ago, came across radio broadcast called “Author Author,” and it was a game show style radio program hosted by Ellery Queen and Ogden Nash. |
| Sarah | It was a huge hit with audiences. And what happened was on air, a mystery scene was presented and guest author… guest authors were challenged to come up with clever explanations for the crime. And so we thought we could restart that, call it clued in conundrums. And Brook do you want to introduce our authors? |
| Brook | I would love to. First, we have Reagan Davis. Reagan Davis is a pen name for the real author who lives in the suburbs of Toronto with her husband, two kids, and a menagerie of pets. When she’s not planning the perfect murder, she enjoys knitting, reading, eating too much chocolate, and drinking too much Diet Coke. She’s an established knitwear designer who has contributed to many knitting books and magazines. |
| Brook | Colleen Cambridge, also known as Colleen Gleason, is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling and award-winning author. She’s written everything from vampire hunters to dystopian romance to steampunk, historical romance, and mysteries with a supernatural flair or a historical setting. All of Colleen’s books feature strong heroines experiencing fast-paced adventures and danger, mystery, and of course, romance. Colleen lives in the Midwest United States with her family and two dogs and is always working on her next book. |
| Brook | Manon Wogan is a publishing professional with a love for fictional murder. Manon reads, reviews, and works with books. Her blog, The Cluesletter, is dedicated to author interviews, book reviews, and the occasional gift guide. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, everyone. |
| Manon | Hello, it’s so great to be back. |
| Colleen Cambridge | We’re very excited about this, even though we’re very nervous about this. |
| Reagan Davis | Thank you for having me. looking forward to it. I listened to the previous episode and it was, it sounded really fun. |
| Sarah | Well, I’m sure that this will be lots of fun as well. So in our version, listeners will hear some of today’s mystery authors create a story plot from just a little bit of prompting. |
| Sarah | Our authors are given crime and a few basic facts. Their challenge is to create a logical beginning and ending and to tell us what tale of intrigue or misadventure lies behind the mystery. |
| Sarah | Their stories are unrehearsed and the twists are entirely their own. No one, not even me or Brook, knows where the stories will go. So listen for the clues, sharpen your powers of deduction and join us for another round of clued in conundrums. |
| Sarah | Brook, do you want to introduce today’s story? |
| Brook | Yes. So here is your scenario, authors. It’s entitled “The Missing Groom”. The wedding of social media influencer Penelope Hart and wealthy tech mogul Graham Blackwell is the event of the summer. More than 200 guests have gathered at the historic Rosewood Estate to celebrate. |
| Brook | The guests are seated. The flowers are perfect. The string quartet is playing and playing and playing but the ceremony cannot begin because the groom is nowhere to be found. At first everyone assumes it’s a case of cold feet. A search party of groomsmen fans out across the estate checking guest rooms gardens and terraces. Twenty minutes later Graham Blackwell’s body is discovered inside the estate’s honeymoon suite he’s alone. |
| Brook | The door is locked from the inside. Resting on his lap is a single long-stemmed red rose and a handwritten note that reads, “it can’t happen”. All right, so we’re very anxious to see what explanation you ah have for this situation. Ah is there someone who would like to go first? |
| Colleen Cambridge | Okay, I will. First, I’m going start by saying that I never plot my books out ahead of time. So, I usually discover whodunit as I go. But I think in this case, it’s pretty obvious that it was the wife who did it and she poisoned him. |
| Colleen Cambridge | She found out he was cheating on her. She’s also a social media influencer, so she’s gonna make it dramatic, whatever she does, because she wants to use it, right? So, she finds out he was cheating on her, so she open she she vapes. She opens up her vape. |
| Colleen Cambridge | Pours the contents into what he likes to drink, which is just fizzy water. And says goodbye to him in the in his little hotel room, knowing that he is going to get on the phone and have a sext, um, zoom call with his lover before he goes down to to marry her. |
| Colleen Cambridge | And course he’s got to lock the doors. So nobody comes in on this little zoom sex call, but she knows he’s going to do this and drink this, um, concoction that vape in it, which is pure nicotine, which will kill you almost instantly. |
| Colleen Cambridge | Now, as far as the rose and the note goes, I’m thinking that came from the sexting partner and that’s how she found out what happened. |
| Colleen Cambridge | So she might put it near him on the bed. I’m not sure how it got on his lap. Maybe he picked it up because he had the rose and he had the note in his hand while he was doing the sexting because he knew that his lover was upset. So he was trying to make her feel better. Oh, this is just for looks, this marriage, blah, blah, blah. That’s all I got. |
| Sarah | I love it. |
| Brook | It’s perfect. That’s so great. Yes. |
| Sarah | All right, let’s hear it, Manon. |
| Manon | Here is what you need to know about Graham Blackwell. He was a jerk. You don’t make as much money as he did by being a good person. Graham Blackwell screwed over everyone he ever knew at one point or another. And guess what? |
| Manon | All of them were at his wedding. But remember, more than 200 guests are already seated and waiting for his entrance. But who wasn’t seated yet? The wedding party. |
| Manon | Now, this was a really large wedding, but it was a small wedding party. They had a maid of honor, best man, and the officiant. And even though these were the closest friends to the couple, they also had reasons to present the groom. |
| Manon | The maid of honor who knew that Graham Blackwell had too many affairs to count was being blackmailed into keeping it secret. The best man was an ex-business partner who Graham Blackwell ousted from their co-founded startup 10 years ago and who claims that it’s all water under the bridge, but his grudge is obvious. |
| Manon | And the officiant, Graham Blackwell’s younger brother who has been secretly in love with Penelope for years. When no one could find the groom, the three members of the wedding party went off to search the Rosewood estate. The officiant was the first person to reach the honeymoon suite. He rattled the doorknob and shouted, “it’s locked!” Together with the best man, they broke down the door to find the body. |
| Manon | What he didn’t realize was that the maid of honor noticed the way he only pretended to try the door. She saw that he had faked it and was immediately suspicious. When questioned by the authorities, the officiant broke down in tears and confessed. As the victim’s brother and his only next of kin, the officiant stood to inherit his entire fortune. |
| Manon | And of course, that would change after the marriage. So, he drugged his brother and staged suicide, complete with faking a door locked from the inside, making it look like Graham Blackwell felt extraordinarily guilty for cheating on Penelope. The officiant hoped to inherit the money and lend a shoulder for Penelope to cry on, but he ended up in jail instead. |
| Brook | Excellent, Manon. |
| Colleen Cambridge | So we’ve got a theme going here. |
| Manon | It’s always about cheating. |
| Colleen Cambridge | It’s always also the person closest to the groom. |
| Sarah | All right, Reagan, let’s hear your take. |
| Reagan Davis | So leading up to the ceremony, the groom finds a note in his jacket pocket instructing him to go to the honeymoon suite and lock the door behind him. It’s a suggestive note promising a wedding night preview if he follows the clues in the room for the scavenger hunt. |
| Reagan Davis | Assuming that the note is from his wife-to-be, he does as he’s told. He enters the room, he closes the door, he locks it behind him. He sees the rose, he picks it up and is pricked by the thorn, which unbeknownst to him is laced with bee venom, which he’s allergic to. |
| Reagan Davis | He reaches for the EpiPen in his pocket, but it’s not there. I guess whoever put the note in took the EpiPen out. So it’s too late and he dies. So who did it? So my suspects were the wife, the business partner, the beekeeper on the estate who thinks that all of these events are bad for her bees and hurting the environment. |
| Reagan Davis | And the killer is maid of honor, Penelope’s sister. Who’s insanely jealous of her influencer’s sister and who believes that she should be marrying the tech mogul because when they met on this very estate at a fundraiser two years before, Penelope spilled red wine on her dress, making the sister have to leave to change, during which she cozied up to the tech mogul and they became a thing. |
| Brook | So good. These are all so good. And while, you know, we did say there’s like kind of a theme here, they’re all still so different. And I think that is the most fun about ah this project is that we get to see kind of a glimpse behind the scenes of how you guys think about it and how you build your build your stories. So that was really great. |
| Sarah | Yeah, thank you. Well, I think this was so much fun, Brook. We should do another round with our authors. So do we have another scenario for them? |
| Brook | Absolutely. This one is entitled “Murder at Mermaid Cove.” Mermaid Cove, an exclusive tropical resort, is sold out for the long holiday weekend. Throngs of beachgoers have convened to enjoy the sun and surf and tour the area’s famous geological sites. Just after sunrise, a jogger discovers the body of a well-known rockhound, Finn Cooper. He’s lying in the sand near the base of an old lighthouse. There are no footprints leading to or from the body. |
| Brook | First responders assume that he jumped in despair. The night before, his fellow vacationers had watched as his fiancée threw her engagement ring at him and stormed away. Yet, on closer inspection, an important clue points to murder. |
| Sarah | Reagan, do you want to go first this time? |
| Reagan Davis | um So Finn and his fiancée argued because she’s so fed up with his rock collecting hobby. And she really thought that this was an escape for them to have a romantic weekend away when it turns out it was a guise for him to hunt for more precious minerals and fossils and things at the seaside. |
| Reagan Davis | um She realized what he was up to when she caught him sending texts to his best friend, paleontologist, saying that he’d made the find of a lifetime. And was sending photos to this guy to get his opinion on the thing that he found on the rocks in front of the lighthouse. |
| Reagan Davis | When they find him, his clothing is torn, and police go upstairs and realize that they find strips of his clothing by the windowsill in the lighthouse, which would have come off when he went through the window. |
| Reagan Davis | So he definitely went through the window. However, it can’t be suicide because the window’s closed. So there’s no way Finn jumped and closed the window behind him. So my suspects are the fiancée, who’s angry about his rock hounding and threw her ring away, a local sea dog who’s really tired of tourists coming and messing up their lovely waterfront, and another rock hound who’s local to the area and territorial and does not want Finn around. |
| Reagan Davis | But who did it? The paleontologist best friend. He did it because when he saw the the pictures from Finn, he realized that this, hang on, it has a name. It’s called a tribulite. A tribulite, which is like an old-fashioned fossilized insect, was rare and valuable and would make his career and earn his living on the speaking circuit and make him an expert. |
| Reagan Davis | He’d agreed to come into town the next day to look at it for Finn. But what he actually did was snuck into town the night before, met Finn, took the thing from him, deleted the text messages from both phones, not knowing the fiancée had seen them and pushed Finn out a window to keep him quiet. And then showed up the next day pretending to just be going out for a jog and was actually the guy that found the body. |
| Brook | That one is very well thought out. Well, both of them were well thought out, Reagan, but like, I almost see that as a future Reagan Davis book right there. |
| Reagan Davis | Maybe throw in some knitting. Yeah, maybe. |
| Sarah | Manon, Colleen, which one of you wants to go? |
| Manon | I can go. think I’m ready. Finn Cooper hunts for rocks as a hobby, but he’s also a scientist specializing in geology, which is why when he hears a strange call coming from the top of the abandoned lighthouse late one night, he assumes there is a person there who might need help. |
| Manon | With a full moon hanging low in the sky, he follows the voice. It reminds him of that of his fiancée, who still isn’t talking to him. He doesn’t see why it was such a big deal. It was a joke. Obviously, his work wife is nothing like a real wife. They are just close friends. |
| Manon | His fiancée doesn’t seem to see it that way, even on vacation. Finn Cooper climbs the steps of the lighthouse until he finds himself in the cupola. He looks around for the source of the call. He sees no one. Now the scientist questions what he once thought was fact. |
| Manon | Did he really hear a voice? Why did he come up here? If Finn had grown up in Mermaid Cove long before the exclusive resort made it into a tourist hotspot, he would have heard the legend of the siren, the reason why the lighthouse was abandoned long ago. |
| Manon | According to the legend, the siren was a mermaid who fell in love with the lighthouse keeper, and she gave up her tail to be with him. But he scorned her, and upon her death from a broken heart, she became a ghost living in the lighthouse. But instead of warning sailors when they were close to shore, she lured them to her until they crashed on the rocks. |
| Manon | It is the siren who lured Finn Cooper to the top of the lighthouse. I don’t think that’s right. It is the siren who lures Finn Cooper to the top of the lighthouse. |
| Manon | He goes outside onto the window. He goes outside onto the widow’s walk and stands still, bewildered, the warm breeze whipping through his hair. He doesn’t see her ghostly figure come up behind him. |
| Manon | He simply feels a brush of cool air, so soft and light. And then he is falling the sandy ground coming up quickly to meet him. The next morning, no one knows what to make of the heartbreaking sight, but Finn’s fiancé looks up, and just for a moment, she sees the silhouette of a woman against the cupola. She blinks, and the woman is gone. |
| Sarah | Oh, that’s chilling, Manon. |
| Brook | I love it. |
| Colleen Cambridge | Have ghost murderess? I love it. |
| Manon | Ghosts. I love ghosts. |
| Brook | We needed a paranormal twist today. So that was great. |
| Sarah | Absolutely. All right, Colleen, let’s hear your solution. |
| Colleen Cambridge | Okay. So, yeah, I don’t really have a full solution. But what I do know is we do have Finn on the ground by the lighthouse. Everybody assumes he jumped because his fiancée broke up with him and he was heartbroken. |
| Colleen Cambridge | but there’s a clue that suggests that maybe he didn’t jump. And that is the smell of bitter almonds around his mouth when they find his body, which means cyanide, which is also a very quick acting poison. |
| Colleen Cambridge | I have a theme going here apparently, but you know, quick acting poisons are very helpful and they don’t leave a mess. So my thinking is someone who has it in for Finn, who is also a chemist of some sort because have to be able get cyanide in its pure form easily-ish. It’s not as available now as it used to be way back in the 40s, 50s when I write these books. |
| Colleen Cambridge | So I’m thinking it still is his fiancée because she’s pissed at him. She’s probably a chemist and she found out he was screwing around on her as, you know, he does, because he is a rock hunter. |
| Colleen Cambridge | He’s a climber. He’s probably really hot. But maybe he was fooling around with her on a guy which really upset her. Because that would be worse than him fooling around with her, fooling around with her with a woman. |
| Colleen Cambridge | So she makes it look like suicide, except, and of course he’s going to meet her at the lighthouse because he thinks she wants to, I guess I’m making this up as I go. which I guess is the point. He wants to meet her at the light. |
| Colleen Cambridge | He agrees to meet her at lighthouse because he thinks they’re going make up. And instead she gives him something to drink with cyanide in it. Maybe champagne, which Agatha Christie did in sparkling cyanide. And she makes sure he’s standing near an open window. |
| Colleen Cambridge | He doesn’t go through the glass because would be too loud. I think people would hear that. He goes, she has a window open at the lighthouse and it’s very romantic. And he drinks the champagne and he thinks they’re going get back together. |
| Colleen Cambridge | She confronts him about lover who’s another rock climber who they go on bro trips together all the time. And as he’s falling from dying from cyanide from choking because they don’t breathe she’s like farewell dude. I don’t know that’s all I got. |
| Brook | I think it’s great. |
| Sarah | i Yeah, I do too. Yeah, I, I love, like you said, Brook, that we just get these very different interpretations and, and solutions to few sentences that, that kick off these stories. And I think each of them could get developed into, into very different books. |
| Brook | Absolutely. Yeah. They’re all beginnings of of the process. And whether you’re more of a discovery writer like myself or Colleen, or you love to plot like Reagan, and I think Manon probably falls into that category too, judging by like the scenarios she’s come up with, these are going to morph and grow and could definitely become full-fledged mysteries. This has been great. |
| Sarah | Yeah. So thank you, each of you for joining us on our Clued in Conundrums and playing our game with us. um Brook, is there anything else you want to? |
| Brook | um Do we want to give each of them an opportunity to share where they can, their books can |
| Sarah | Oh, yes, yes, yes, yeah. So before we sign off, why don’t each of you share where listeners can find you if they want to read some of your fabulous work? |
| Sarah | So, Regan, I will start with you. |
| Reagan Davis | You can find me at ReaganDavis.com. My books are all available on Amazon as Reagan Davis. And I hang out on social media as Reagan Davis. |
| Sarah | Fabulous. |
| Reagan Davis | Thank you for inviting me to play. It was fun. |
| Sarah | Colleen. |
| Colleen Cambridge | You could find me at ColleenCambridge.com. I also write as Colleen Gleason. So you can find me on social media as both Colleen Cambridge and or Colleen Gleason because I was Colleen Gleason long before I was Colleen Cambridge, which made it tough when I had to establish a new name. |
| Colleen Cambridge | So I just keep everything under Gleason mostly. And my books are available pretty much everywhere. Also you know, libraries, bookstores, Amazon, indie bookstores. Most of them are on Audible and other audiobook vendors. I mean, you can find them pretty much anywhere. |
| Sarah | Great. And Manon. |
| Manon | You can find me on multiple social media platforms at Mystery Manon M-A-N-O-N that’s Instagram, TikTok, and also YouTube. And you can go to link in my bio and find out even more, including my newsletter, the clues letter and my new book club, the red herring book club. |
| Sarah | Fabulous. So yeah, thanks again for joining us. And we hope you consider joining us for another Clued in Conundrum. |
| Manon | Thank you very much. This was a lot of fun. |
| Brook | And thank you for joining us today, listeners. But until next but until next time, I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
