A few days before the holiday, in the farmhouse kitchen of a dairy-farm bed-and-breakfast, Mae West is shelling a pan of hard-boiled eggs and not concentrating. Her adoptive mother wants the shells perfect for the antique egg plate she plans to hand down. Somebody has opened the paprika, and the smell has carried Mae back to a stool beside her birth mother, sprinkling the same spice on the same dish, years before a fire took that family away. Her sister-in-law offers to hide the jar. Mae says no: the memories are fading, and she will take them however they come. Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes begins there, among the eggshells, and its best pages never stray far from that kitchen.
A Thanksgiving Table, Tonya Kappes Style
This is the twenty-eighth novel in a series the author has been publishing herself since 2018, and the stage is familiar to its readers. Mae owns Happy Trails Campground in Normal, Kentucky, a town whose name is its oldest joke. She is engaged to Hank, the former sheriff now working as a private investigator, and she spends her free hours with four friends known as the Laundry Club Ladies, who began as a book club and drifted into amateur detection.
What sets this entry apart is how seriously it takes the holiday. Mary Elizabeth, the adoptive mother, cooks one feast for her paying guests and a second for everyone she loves, laid out on new tables under a carport with a gas fire and a mantel of gathered leaves. Mae’s contribution is a corn pudding made from a recipe card in her birth mother’s handwriting, one of the few things saved from the blaze, and the novel lets that dish carry real weight. Mary Elizabeth has insisted on it every year, though she dislikes corn. Across Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes, grief and gratitude sit at the same table, and neither has to leave.
The quiet heart of the book belongs to Betts and her husband Lester, a former preacher who went to prison for killing a man and has come home, pardoned and terminally ill. At dinner he thanks the company for letting him come at all. Betts nurses him with a faith that never curdles into denial, and the town’s uneasy decision to forgive him without forgetting is handled with more grace than a cozy needs to show.
Kappes also keeps the holiday on the page longer than most seasonal mysteries manage. Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes moves from a homecoming party the night before to the feast itself and on into the weekend, with snow arriving early and Mary Elizabeth already announcing that the hosting will pass to Mae once the wedding is behind her.
Trappings, Turkeys and a Thanksgiving Death
The mystery begins on the holiday itself. A local man who has been brawling with old schoolmates turns up dead on Thanksgiving morning, and the first explanation is a catastrophic reaction to dozens of wasp stings, the kind of anaphylaxis that kills in minutes without an injector to hand. Mae, and a nosy local reporter, doubt that wasps manage that on their own in November. Behind the death sits an older one: a seventeen-year-old who went over a cliff on a hiking trip decades earlier, and the matching story his friends told the sheriff afterwards, word for word.
That cold case is the cleverest idea Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes has. Reunion week brings back the whole group of teenagers who were there, now grown, scattered and suspicious of one another, and Mae’s job becomes working out which of them rehearsed what. The most rewarding of the people she questions is a young man left disabled by alcohol poisoning as a teenager, who now speaks to schools about drinking. Kappes could have made him bitter or saintly. She makes him practical and generous, and the scene at his family’s house on the cliff is one of the best in the book.
Where the Plot Loses Its Footing
The trouble is that the novel keeps losing the thread it has spun. A long subplot about Hank’s former flame turning up to ask for his help produces pages of jealousy that go nowhere in particular, and once the case heats up, the rival simply drifts away. The opening chapters spend heavily on series history, from a governor’s pardons to an ex-husband’s murder, in recap paragraphs that newcomers will need and veterans will skim.
The ending is the weaker for both. When the answer comes, the guilty party explains method and motive at length while holding Mae at a disadvantage, an old device that here does the work the clues should have done. A coroner’s elaborate theory about a home remedy, pressed hard in the middle, is waved away in a single line. And Mae walks into crime scenes, lies to her friends and takes evidence to a hospital doctor with an ease the book never questions. Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes wants the warmth of a cozy and the drive of a thriller, and in the final act it falls between them.
Readers should also know that the book involves poisoning, a teenager’s death, captivity, fire, terminal illness and a history of underage drinking, all treated without graphic detail, and that the romance stays at the level of kisses and seating plans.
The Woman in the Camper
Tonya Kappes lives in the Kentucky woods with her husband and a rescue cat, and she writes from a camper, which shows in every detail of hookups, cold batteries and frozen water lines. Her output is formidable. Besides this series she has written cozies set around a coffee shop, a mail route and a magical family, and a holiday sequence that includes its own Thanksgiving title, Thanksgiving Treachery. Her books have twice been picks of the Woman’s World Book Club.
She brings out this series herself, with an outside editing firm and a cover artist credited at the back, and the economics show in both directions. The books arrive fast and keep a loyal audience close, but small slips get through that a slower schedule would catch. Readers who meet Mae first through Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes will find the earlier books worth going back to, since most of the cast’s history was laid down there and is only summarised here.
Where It Leaves You
Trapping, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving by Tonya Kappes works best as a novel about who gets a seat at the holiday table and at its weakest as a puzzle. The final chapter returns to the campground for a second, smaller celebration a few days after the holiday, as the town packs away its pumpkins for Christmas, and its closing call sets up the next book.
Readers who want the culinary side stronger should try Murder and Mamon by Mia P. Manansala, where a family restaurant and a sharper investigation share the stage, or Murder by Cheesecake by Rachel Ekstrom Courage for more bakery-adjacent sleuthing. Those after a Thanksgiving book with the family and no corpse could turn to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, the great novel of a family that never quite finishes a meal. Kappes’s book will not change anyone’s mind about cozies, but for a reader already fond of Normal, it is good company for the long weekend.