Not The Trip We Planned

Author(s): Linda N Edelstein, Carol G Kerr

Location(s): Chicago

Genre(s): Cozy Mystery

Era(s): 2020s

Not the Trip We Planned is friendship fiction set in Chicago and will appeal to readers who like quirky humor and older characters who are willing to get into some good trouble.

Chickie and Maddy’s unexpected adventure highlights how connections endure across distance and time and the ways women who are overlooked can be surprisingly clever.

Maddy and Chickie have known each other for decades, could not be more different, and want to feel more alive before they die. Their long-planned holiday gone wrong comes out right. But to get to why a plastic surgeon died suddenly in Chicago they must navigate a complicating DNA discovery, give a newly-widowed, long-time friend news she doesn’t want, and still meet their own goals for their reunion interrupted by sudden death.

Not the Trip We Planned appeals to readers who have enjoyed Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series or the TV show Grace and Frankie. The sensibility is both irreverent and serious as our characters are each navigating universal challenges of growing older while also re-visiting memories and key settings across the city of Chicago.

The novel features the Palmer House Hotel as a setting throughout the book. The lead characters check in on page 34 and check out on page 284 and detect their way around Chicago to a satisfying resolution of a mystery while also dining, drinking and enjoying the Palmer House spa. In the course of the story, they fill the reader in on the history of the hotel and the joys of Bertha’s Brownies as well as scenes from the Gold Coast, Miracle Mile, and other neighborhood landmarks.

Authors Linda Edelstein and Carol Kerr are clinical psychologists who met during their graduate training in Chicago years ago and vowed to someday write mystery fiction because it would be more fun than their dissertations. Life events made them long-distance friends but in 2025 they finally fulfilled their promise and set it in the city they both knew and loved.

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