I was three paragraphs deep into a scene when Google destroyed it.

Look, when you write for a living… er… for fun, you google a lot of things. Researching when things happen, or if things happened the way you say they did in your story is a big part of editing and even creating your fiction. Some days my search history looks like a crime scene.

In one of my stories, two detectives are having a good-natured back and forth about how the married detective’s wife will eventually leave him for the unmarried detective. The married detective then explains to the unmarried detective that while his wife does like him, it’s the same way she likes the skunk who lives in their back yard… from a distance.

Great character moment. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then I remembered: this scene happens to be set in Böblingen, Germany.

I turned to my husband. “Do they even have skunks in Germany?”

He paused. “I’m not sure.”

“The only European skunk I’m familiar with is Pepe Le Pew,” I said, “and he was French.”

So he googled it.

The answer is no. There are NO skunks native to Germany. OR ANYWHERE IN EUROPE.

Are you kidding me? Not only do I need to rewrite this scene, I just found out my childhood was a lie. Pepe Le Pew was faking his French accent the whole time.

After further googling, the closest relative to a skunk in Europe is the European Badger (Meles meles). Which, fine. My fictional backyard intruder became a European badger. I even named him Klaus.

Here’s the thing about writing cozy mysteries—or any fiction, really. The details matter. Not because readers are fact-checking every animal reference (though apparently I am), but because when something feels off, it pulls them out of the story.

And in a cozy mystery, where the whole point is to create a world that feels warm and real and lived-in, even when there’s a dead body involved, those small details are important. They’re what make Blue Lake, Wisconsin, for example, feel like a place you could visit. They’re what make a detective feel like someone you’d actually want to grab coffee with.

So yes, I had to rewrite that scene. But now when you read it (eventually, when I finish this book and stop googling things), you can rest assured: every animal mentioned is geographically accurate. No fake French skunks for cheap visual humor, although AI did help me build this picture.

French Badgers are Real

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