Breathe easily, residents of small-town Wisconsin. Marshall Cook is outsourcing his mayhem to Iowa this time around.
Cook is the UW-Madison professor and mystery author who has turned the fictional town of Mitchell, Wis., into a hotbed of larceny and homicide in his last two books, “Murder Over Easy” and “Murder at Midnight.” Both books were based on actual murders; “Midnight” was a fictionalized take on the notorious unsolved 1998 murder of Dane priest Rev. Alfred Kunz.
For his follow-up, “Twin Killing,” Cook decided to send his sleuth, community newspaper editor Monona Quinn, out of state rather than make Mitchell as deadly as the little seaside community on “Murder, She Wrote.”