#1 Henny Penny Farmette Mysteries
The Book Cage: Episode 101 - A Beeline to Murder
Back before the Book Cage was The Book Cage, I purchased a book by hotdog weirdo Meera Lester which I read between Killer and Jagged Steele. We're going to be doing a nostalgic celebration of The Book Cage here. At 300 pages, we'll be skipping a lot of it, which is fine because almost nothing happens in it. Except for planning for a Frenchman's funeral and the bee worship. Find out how to "Plant a Fairy Ring," this Friday 5pm eastern.
Oh hell yeah
Oh good, a cozy mystery. I was wondering if we'd covered any of these
Just in case you need a reminder on the author https://1900hotdog.com/2020/12/learning-day-365-ways-to-live-happy/
Bee lady
I also wrote all over this book when I read it two years ago, so that'll be a fun bonus for everyone
INCLUDES FARMING TIPS AND DELICIOUS RECIPES
It certainly does
"like a small child or a Jedi might do" is another hotdog line that runs through my head at odd hours
I should mention, this woman wrote fan fiction about her house
That's what this is
Fanfiction about the what
The main location in this book, the "Henny Penny Farmette," is Meera Lester's house
The main character is not Meera Lester, but she lives in Meera Lester's house
It's very bizarre
Oooh; just learned why there was a sharp decline in the quality of Donny Cates' books and why he wound up getting pulled from them all; he was in a car accident and got some pretty severe head trauma.
I'd assumed he was just having some creative burnout
Coming up on the top of the hour, it's A Beeline to Murder, ugh. No preview, instead you get effusive praise
Joanne Fluke's blurb sounds very sarcastic
Credit for bone-conductive audio this early in the sci-fi game.
"Oh, did she turn LAAAAADYYY Farmer? She didn't? Well I guess us GALS are just gatherers instead of born hunters like Officer Aayla" [making slow clit-rubbing motions the entire time she dictates this quote]
--Joanne Fluke, Lady Author
I'm refusing to explain to my coworkers why I just laughed in the middle of this meeting
let's goooooooo
"Top of the hour" he says
pft it's clearly 630
To be fair, he's still recovering from a six month project
Top of any hour is when book party starts
but what whiskey to have?
5 time appreciation day winner suddenly too good to get his own book cage rolling on time, we see how it is
Sour?
I know nothing of whiskey
Time to begin the process
Ooooh Meera Lester
I bet meera's husband Moe really liked this book.
I hope said murder is via actual bees.
GIF
"Just give us a name."
"No way. Hive bros for life."
You have to admit, it's an idyllic scene to set
Bees with tiny switchblades.
It's important to note that each chapter begins with a fake quote from a fake book the main character hasn't written named after the house she lives in
Drones don't-
I don't think that's true but I don't know enough about honeybees to dispute it
And that's how i met your mother
Interestingly this is true for drones but only if they're xenomorphs.
"I was doubtful, I mean, who wants to date a single mother with fifty thousand daughters?"
woody allen
It is also important to note that when I read this book 2.5 years ago I wrote notes. I apparently thought this tree crotch line would be good to make fun of
✅ Redhead
"AAAAAAAAAARGH THIS WAS A MISTAAAAAAAAKE!" - Woody Allen after having stuck his dick in a beehive.
Crotch bees are second only to ground bees for worst bees
Is it just me or are these some porny fucking lines for a gardening scene
i want this fecund life
All authors have a redhead fetish
not chuck austen
Obviously I'm in no position to judge
Also, thousands of honeybees? Motherfuker that is an infestation. Call animal control.
Not my precious bees!
Hahaha it's a fucking bee jailbreak.
I'm rooting for the bees so hard.
Put the bees on leashes, Abby
t h i c k e n i n g
GIF
Corpus: one of the grosser ways to say "body"
It's just pretentious
That's why lawyers use it
Chef Boner
She habeus on my corpus til I in flagrante delicto
It takes a special kind of person to see a wild beehive and think "Hey, cool. Free bees."
Right?
Like, she's a fucking serial beenapper.
And equate capturing bees with saving them
Also I dont think you build a hive by just cramming the old hive into a box.
In fact I'm sure thats how you dont do it.
Especially not by fucking DROPPING it.
GIF
ME
An angry, gay French chef? Now I've heard everything!
It's really good that the author is trying to get us all horny for this corpse.
Did I say good? I meant weird.
Every line of this book is infused with sensuality.
Just your standard sassy gay buff police chief
:SteeleYourself:
I assume he also had a baguette shoved up his ass at the same time
French exclamations, my favourite kind
Ooh la la!
Oh hes got French Chef Syndrome, its.......terminal.
He was furiously pointing out the inaccuracies in Ratatouille
Sacré bleu!
"HOW CAN ZE RAT MAKE ZE FOOD!? 'AIR EEZ NOT EVEN CONNECTED TO LE BRAIN!"
Honestly surprised this is the first time this word showed up. Surprised it was the book from 2015 though
Bilingual people regularly go on hilarious tirades in their native language for the benefit of passersby
That's French for "problematic"
this is 2015??
Man. Fucking speedrunning the benefit of the doubt, aren't we Meera
You can't have the French chef makin' cannolis
Somebody call Tony Prito!
Eyyyy, fuggeddabowdit, mon ami
I bet hes just pretending to be French and tells people things like ":Baked ziti is French!"
I can't tell if this is all a bit, you all actually know that it means "he's late", right?
"Something's wrong with this scene: it's not nearly French enough"
I do but its funner this way.
In fact, she was first on the scene so often they began to suspect her
Her bee senses tingle whenever crime is near
She doesnt realize its just the chefs mix CD of French pop and the Wakfu intro and not opera.
I don't know, I assume that's what he looked like when he was alive
Good work, 47. Now head for an exit.
Just get your fingerprints all over the crime scene, Abby
That's seven years ofpolice training for sure
Chef Boyardee
She will always refer to this character as "Chief Bob Allen."
Always the full name and title
"ChiefBobAllen, charmedI'msure"
Chief Bob Allen likes people to address Chief Bob Allen by Chief Bob Allen's proper title. It's not weird.
Chief Bob Allen will be devastated, Chief and Chef used to have an odd couple type sitcom.
Okay strangling a French chef is barely illegal, he probably had it coming.
I don't speak the french part of quebecois, just the angry.
I've been honing my comedic voice for many years. It's very complex
All you have to do to get in a lethal duel with a French chef is yell "Bechamel sauce is just country gravy, I eat it on buttermilk biscuits!"
Just a twinge of sadness. Nothing major.
Now hang on, Abby. Just because he's dead now doesn't mean he'll be that way later
Il est en retard.
It's great that we never actually got to interact with this person before he died, really brings all this sadness home
It's like souffle. You just have to let it settle
He's just sleeping
Called in Russki Russkovitz
requiem for a guy who threw things at walls and wasted fine chocolate
"Hi, new best friend. I'm here to lecture you!"
In walks a hobo
Im imagining these two as Gillian Anderson in a beekeepers suit, and the blonde lady with knives from The Night Comes for Us
Abby's memory works hard on the exposition.
im not not into it
I'll get right on that, girlfriend
She remembered all of that just from a sweater!
"Let's let the known lunatic wander around the crime scene"
He gave cat ladies coffee, he didn't deserve what the french call..un garrote
Apparently there's a joke here
I like how they apparently only sent one cop to a murder scene.
They figured he just slipped on butter and cracked his skull. It's the leading cause of death in french chefs.
"Haha, we do have fun."
[corpse lets out various gasses]
Got his neckerchief caught in the knife rack and strangled himself.
"You're such a good detective. Don't you agree, reader?"
GIF
"In fact, he appears to have never baked in his life. Maybe we're looking at an imposter!"
Chief Bob Allen thought it was a good idea to send most of his workforce elsewhere
Hahahaha if its after like dawn and he doesnt have flour and stuff on his clothes he cant be much of a chef, you have to start early to be baking things to have them ready for the day.
Weird that Chief Bob Allen sent them that far when the town's in Iowa
Wait........their whole fucking police force is EIGHT people?!
Small town!
"Fuck you, everyone"
My town has at least ten.
And a sheriff.
Could've been worse, could have had Chief Charlie Swan and his force
No crime, but fair share of gangbangers
Gang members LOVE small towns, you can sell so much drugs to towns of less than 500 people who are mostly retirees.
"Then there's the federal prison to the west, the minimum security prison to the east, and the high security asylum for supervillians to the south"
Plus there's that kooky doomsday cult that culls the impure and the innocent alike every Saturday after curfew
They got that prison thanks to a fantastic rap video
Is there a Chilis out in front of the prison?
Bikers just love getting a cold brew after sampling the finest vintages from Napa valley vineyards
Yes, Napa Valley, that notorious hotbed of crime.
"HEY ASSHOLE! THIS SAUVEGON BLANC ISN'T PROPERLY CHILLED! I'LL FUCKING SKIN YOU!"
Chief Bob Allen demands his officers smell like piss
Chief Bob Allen seems like he's bringing a lot of stuff from home into the office with him and making it everyone else's problem.
Like the Hardy Boys, Meera Lester respects the Dumpster brand
"Why are you telling me all of this? I'm not a cop anymore."
A drunken Frenchman? Now I've heard everything!
Wait he wont ask for help from another office because he's cheap? Do you have to hire sheriffs to get them to help?
"I want the panorama shot because at sunset the light catches the paint just right and it looks like neon and starlight."
Thanks, capitalism
Yeah the French, notorious for cooking with things that are not alcohol.
Nah, just town tamers
I guarantee this police chief has a fuckin MRAP and is just saving his budget for gas for it.
Chief Bob Allen's Chief Bob Allenmobile
Abby muses on her first big case. Which was apparently committed to steal a rug?
Classic detective work, pin it on an immigrant.
Under arrest for having fine taste
Not sure why sexual assault was necessary to obtain a rug
It's more incidental.
Why the fuck is the cozy mystery genre rife with drug crimes and sexual assault
Like sometimes i guess you're committing a horrific rape and think "gee, that lamp would really complement my end table"
Like, why can't it just be somebody stealing pies off windowsils
In for a strangling in for a sexual assault, you can only go to prison so hard, I guess.
And once youve strangled someone to death, you might as well take their shit.
To establish she's hardcore and a badass or something
Skyrim rules.
GIF
Okay, yeah, this tracks
Nothing weird here
Virgil ... Smith
Afros were still a thing in 2015?
Afros will always be a cool hairstyle and nobody can convince me otherwise.
They never died, just like disco
GIF
... doughnuts?
two minutes
that's nothing in word time but it's a long ass fucking time to be hiking up your belt
Cops have so much crap on their belts it makes sense. Poor Otto is in danger of a hernia.
with his diet, he's in danger of a lot of other shit too
Abby interrupts thinking about her disfigured hand to call Otto fat again
Also I love that his wife is in one sentence revaled as a crazy person, insisting on a paleo diet.
She's a big joe rogan fan
We found our Chet?
Fatphobia was more of a reflex than a learned behavior back then
Abby..........did you never think to like.......just use some kind of glove to keep your thumb locked? Or like........use your other hand to shoot? You can train for that you know?
Her other hand is a hook, it just hasn't come up yet
All the better, she can take the hook off and replace it with a chainsaw.
Groovy.
Meera Lester describing the many colors of Virgil
Virgil sounds very sick
Or Meera has black people confused with beetles again.
Straight from vomit to the other strange choice for this book, every chapter ends with weird tips
Otto spent longer adjusting his belt than resisting a doughnut
Which, to be clear, I don't blame him for one bit.
Beehives are made of bee vomit, it makes sense.
Disco Elysium assured me even veteran cops get nauseous around dead bodies
Imagine if Abby was a girl Harry Dubois.
Impossible, Smith isn't a beetle name.
Very valuable tips. Like: feed your bees or they'll starve
We are writing this
More murder stories should get interrupted by HGTV
Wait, this mystery novel also assumes the reader has an interest in beekeping? what?!
Was this written by or for someone with ADHD and a bee obsession?
Eat some "meadowsweet" Virgil
Gotta pad that wordcount somehow
Deeelicious.
ME
What is it with healthy people and insisting you drink tea made with non tea plants?
Peppermint is already good. You shouldn't have to wait to vomit to enjoy it.
Just toss some random ass leaves in boiling water and you are gonna do great!
Abby uses a clue to neg her grandmother's jewelry
Anyway, bees
Meera loves the word proffered
I think Grandma might have been bullshitting.
What do we know about Abby other than BEES
OOOOO! Would'st milady kindly GRACE this man with a donation of dead flesh?
And the all-important red-gold hair
We know her grandma is a liar.
And she was a cop
And her thumb is fucked up.
But I mean as a person
In walks a hippie
A cop whose best friend is also a cop in the same small town she moved to when she stopped being a cop
Poor bastard died of Homicide before his Suicide Girl arrived.
I don't understand the question. We just told you she used to be a cop and you know she has bees. What more is there to a person?
Like who does she assault if not the bees.
Naming is hard
Shes basically Anita Blake if you replaced "latina vampire hunter and sex haver" with "Napa Valley cop and beekeeper."
Why do you assume all these cops and an ambulance in no rush and a coroner's van means a bad thing occurred unless you're GUILTY?
Now, you might think this is an important character based on how much time she spent describing her
Tallulah Berry is a Jimmy Buffett song, right?
But from what I remember, this is the extent of her appearance
It's sounding like Chef Jean-Louis had a heart attack from stress
Bite that lip
Heart attacks usually dont involve garrotes but they COULD.
Landlords always murder their tenants when they don't pay. It's the best way to get...paid?
I was already tired of Abby's shit
Why not just make her a cop, Meera?
I'm sure all of this won't prevent the evidence from holding up in court
These seem like things a white girl with dreadlocks would say, sure
Because otherwise the middle 200 pages of this book couldn't be about farming
Farmer Cop tho.
That last part sounds hippie-ish
Fuckin Gandhi.