Mary Pauline Lowry’s foray into so-called cozy murder mysteries emerged from an unexpected confluence of inspirations.
First, she’d been thinking about motherhood, sympathizing with her “beyond strapped” friends raising children. “I think there’s something about our modern American culture that is making motherhood particularly challenging and difficult,” Lowry posits.
Then, therapy led her to pole dancing classes and she learned a whole new appreciation for “this gorgeous, incredible balletic art form that has developed in the last 50 years out of strip clubs.”
And finally, she found that reading another mystery with her sister “really kindled that young passion for reading that I had.”
Behold, Last Night Was Killer, a humorous thriller about a single mother whose pole dancing class lands at the center of an unanticipated mystery – which, in turn, unlocked a new research passion of its own for Lowry.
“I went back and started digging into the history of comedic murder mysteries by women in the U.S.,” the author says. “I was studying that new art form as well, and it just really dovetailed nicely with wanting to write about pole dancing, and the pole dancing community.”
The comedy, passion, and empathy came easily. Writing her last work, The Roxy Letters, an epistolary novel about millennial malaise in a gentrifying Austin, Lowry says she learned to “really immerse myself very fully in comedy,” finding dark humor to be “a balm for the soul.” For this latest work, it was the murder mystery puzzle that proved to be Lowry’s biggest challenge.
“I grew up with a grandma who was a writer and a mystery reader,” says the born-and-raised Austinite. Following her lead and the many thriller writers that have charmed audiences over the years, Lowry dove into one riddle after another as she slowly unraveled her own. “That was really exciting, to hit this literary vein that’s been around for 85 years that I just hadn’t tapped into as much before.”
Where They Read: Tiny Grocer
“They have great air conditioning,” Lowry explains, an essential for summertime reading. “I go to First Light, do my stop-and-chats, get a book … Then, I walk over to Tiny Grocer.”
What to Read Next
On Lowry’s summer reading shelf is another cozy mystery newbie from Austin: journalist-turned-suspenseful-novelist Jess Cannon. Her debut, A Zoom With a View, came out this May and follows an English professor and photographer in Texas who snaps her way into a mystery.
First Light Books hosts a release party for Mary Pauline Lowry’s Last Night Was Killer on July 7.
What the Austin Chronicle Staff Is Reading This Summer
Amanda Eyre Ward’s Latest Book Follows a Family’s Complicated Journey
Journalist Lauren Hough Writes Her Own On the Road
Zell Miller III Shares His First Book as Austin’s Indigenous Offspring
Laekan Zea Kemp Is on the Tween Reading Beat
Summer Reading Roundup
This article appears in June 26 • 2026.
