Publication Date: August 11, 2026
A laugh-out-loud mystery following the indomitable hot mess Mo Ellery, whose job as a school crossing guard pulls her into an unhinged murder investigation.
Mo Ellery’s 29th birthday is a disaster. After one small accident—the exposure of her boyfriend’s genitals (well, maybe not that small) on a work video call—she manages to get fired, dumped, and kicked out of their overpriced Chicago apartment. Luckily, a sign appears to guide Mo to her new life: “Looking for flexible part-time work? Become a school crossing guard!” It’s everything Mo has been looking for: health insurance. How hard can it be?
A few weeks later, Mo is adjusting to her new low-paying job, her bisexual reawakening, and her new neighborhood’s wacky characters. There’s Claudia, an old woman who refuses to let Mo help her cross the street, and Marlowe, a tween cell phone prodigy whose antics terrify her. But Mo’s greatest nemesis is Poodle Dude, a guy with an SUV full of poodles who speeds through her intersection each morning. . . until the day he speeds into a sinkhole. Mo tries and fails to shield innocent eyes from his bloody corpse, but succeeds in accidentally becoming the guardian to his three poodles.
And that’s not the worst of it: some of the locals are convinced that Poodle Dude was murdered. Their allegations are obviously ridiculous, but Mo, desperate for distractions—and for several hot neighbor-suspects—reluctantly agrees to help. But Mo the detective is just as chaotic as Mo the underemployed adult, and the three entitled poodles are not helping. When a second local dies under mysterious circumstances, it’s going to take all of Mo’s broadly applicable and transferrable skills to find the killer.
Murderers beware. . . DON’T CROSS MO ELLERY!
Don’t Cross Mo Ellery by Birdie Horne starts unexpectedly since Mo needs to reinvent herself when she loses her boyfriend, her home, and her job all on the same day. From there, as she tries to piece her life together, another twist comes when there’s a death, or could it be murder?
When she takes a job as a school crossing guard, which includes health insurance, things don’t really improve. She’s a difficult person to like since she doesn’t seem to want to take responsibility for anything. Her best friend Hannah has her own needs and life and can’t always be there for Mo like she would prefer. When an older woman, Claudia, and Mo are first on the crime scene of the car accident, which Claudia is convinced is a murder, they also take temporary custody of the three poodles who just lost their owner. But what happens when Claudia is also murdered?
There are funny moments, slapstick in nature, as well as a few cringeworthy ones. There are a lot of secondary characters who round out the story. In the end, Mo does figure out who the murderer is, and the story ends with closure and the loose ends tied up.
Don’t Cross Mo Ellery is a mystery that had laugh-out-loud moments while amateur sleuth Mo figures out whodunnit.
Birdie Horne is the combined pen name of former enemies Eden Robins and MW Garguilo. Over the years, they have been love rivals, co-godmothers, and neighbors across an alley in Chicago. Separately, they have published over twenty books, and together they have a resume full of the kinds of jobs that genuinely worry their parents. This is their first outing as Birdie Horne.
