The mystery novel, in recent years, has been targeted to readers with very specific interests. There are mysteries set in the world of antique dealers, there are plot lines weaved around needlework and sewing, and there are even who-dunnits cooked up in so-called "culinary mysteries." One other established genre is the home renovation, or "DIY" mystery. Maine is a popular setting for such titles as "Fatal Fixer-upper" and Spackled and Spooked."

Author Jennie Bentley.

 In Jennie Bentley's new release "Plaster and Poison," the main character Avery and her boyfriend Derek have been asked to help renovate an old carriage house behind a friend's B and B in the fictitious town of Waterfield, Maine.

The owner is about to marry the town's chief of police, Wayne Rassmussen, and in this early excerpt of the book, read by MPBN's Suzanne Nance, Avery is ruminating on how she'll remake the run-down carriage house into a romantic Parisian-style retreat.

"And the bedroom -- that would be black and white, too. Maybe some toile on the walls, the kind of black and white wallpaper that looks like old fabric with scenes of women washing clothes, or children playing with small dogs or tending chickens, or French vanilla paint with love poetry stenciled around the wall -- in French."

But the excitement of the renovation is interrupted a few pages later, when Avery and Derek stumble upon a body amid the paint cans and plaster of the carriage house

"'Sh**,' Derek said softly, stopping on the second to top step. 'Looks like we need to get Wayne out of bed after all." 'Why?' I peered around him. 'Oh no! Who's that?' A man's figure was lying on the floor with an elegant cashmere overcoat covering the still form from calves to shoulders. I could see a dark head and a pair of wool trousers sticking out at their respective ends. Derek didn't move. 'I think that's the guy Shannon's been hanging out with!'"

But as we later learn, the body of the guy that Shannon's been hanging out with isn't actually the jumping off point of the story. "I always start out with the house and do the set-up for that first and weave in a history mystery because I have one of those in each book, and then of course we get to the body at that point," says author Jennie Bentley.

Bentley says this is the third book in a series that began with "Fatal Fixer-upper" and "Spackled and Spooked," all set in Maine. Bentley, who now lives in Nashville, isn't from Maine originally. She admits that she's never been here. But she figured that it must look something like her native country of Norway.

"You've got the rocky coast and kind of the yellowy beaches and the rocks and the pine trees and the moose and all of that," she says. "So really what I'm doing is describing what I used to look at growing up, except I put it in Maine instead."

"What I say is if you like 'Murder, She Wrote' and the Jessica Fletcher type mysteries you'll like this kind of genre," says Tom Robinson, a Nashville-based author and constultant who serves as Jennie Bentley's publicist.

He says these home renovation novels, called "cozy" mysteries because they leave out the blood and guts and "adult situations," also offer readers valuable information about how to work on their own house. "In Jennie's case, with these DIY mysteries, you get an entertaining read and even in the back of her books you will get a home renovation tip."

Bentley, as it turns out, started out in the renovation business, and became a writer later on. For DIY mystery novelist Sarah Graves of Eastport, Maine, it was the other way around.

"Well, my husband and I were looking for a place to relocate, and first we discovered Eastport, and then we discovered this nearly 200-year-old house, which was vacant at the time, and we simultaneously kind of fell in love with Eastport, and fell in love, in particular, with this house."

Graves says the couple set about rehabilitating the home, and have actually performed most of the projects she has included in her 13 novels. Old Maine houses, she says, like mysteries, are full of suprises at every turn.

"That is precisely it. On the the one hand you are uncovering things in the sort of moral world of this murder mystery, and with the other hand you are uncovering things that are hidden in the walls or under the floors, or stuffed up into an old cubby hole," she says. "So, yes, there's an exact parallel, in my mind, bewteen those two things."

Graves just released her most recent work "Crawlspace" in December, and is working on a new book called "Stranglehold." The book will once again feature her main character Jake Tiptree, who encounters a person from her past.

Graves says the book will also involve a major scraping job on an old front porch, 'And repairing it and priming it and painting it, but there's also some concrete mixing going on and that turns out to be a pretty specific 'you'd better do that right' kind of a job."

Some of Graves' ealier works include "Repair to Her Grave," "Tool and Die," and "Mallets Aforethought."