A cozy mystery series

Small towns.
Big secrets.
Cozy mysteries from the Little House trail.

Ellie Merritt travels the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage trail with a camera bag, a growing PorchTube channel, and a talent for asking questions at exactly the wrong time. Each stop brings a new small town, an old story, and trouble nobody planned to put on the itinerary.

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Cozy mysteries set in the real towns of the Laura Ingalls Wilder world — Walnut Grove, Pepin, and beyond. Dry Midwestern wit. Historical intrigue. Dead people who nobody saw coming.

The Little Prairie Mysteries series

Three books. Plenty of trouble.

Ellie came to document heritage sites, local history, and the places Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind. Then the town started giving her better material.

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Book 1

A Little Drama on the Prairie

Ellie Merritt arrives in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, hoping to document the Wilder Days festival for her channel. She leaves having documented considerably more than she planned.

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Book 2

A Little Scandal on the Prairie

Pepin, Wisconsin. Disputed birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder. A museum with secrets it would rather not discuss. Ellie is beginning to see a pattern.

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A Little Patch on the Prairie book cover
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Book 3

A Little Patch on the Prairie

Traer, Iowa. A quilt auction with a very old quilt and a very disputed provenance. Ellie is starting to think she should have stayed in Cedar Rapids.

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Series trailer

Before you read, watch

A look at Ellie's world — the prairies, the people, and the trouble.

What to expect

Ellie's world

Real Wilder country

Each book is set in an actual Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage location — places you can visit, with histories worth arguing about.

Prairie Ledger

Ellie runs a modest PorchTube channel documenting Wilder sites. She didn't expect her audience to grow quite this way.

Quiet mysteries

No gore. No melodrama. The kind of small-town trouble that happens in plain sight, which is somehow worse.

History with an opinion

Museums, disputed maps, quilts of questionable provenance. Historical memory gets complicated when it's worth something to someone.

Midwestern deadpan

The humor is dry, the stakes are real, and nobody overreacts. It's Iowa. We're fine. Everything is fine.

Good people, mostly

Small towns contain multitudes. The same community that closes ranks against outsiders also leaves casseroles on doorsteps.

Meet Ellie Merritt

She came for the history. The history had other plans.

Ellie Merritt is a Cedar Rapids–based content creator with a PorchTube channel called Prairie Ledger, a modest but growing subscriber count, and a genuine obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage trail. She is observant, dry, and slightly too honest about her own motivations.

She is not a detective. She keeps saying this. It doesn't seem to help.

The Little Prairie Mysteries follow Ellie from heritage site to heritage site, each book rooted in a real Wilder location — Walnut Grove, Pepin, Traer — where the past and the present have managed, somehow, to produce a body.

Ellie Merritt

Content creator • Prairie Ledger • Cedar Rapids, IA

"I run a small documentary channel about Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage sites. I travel to places like Walnut Grove and Pepin and Traer to film historic locations, talk to local historians, and document what remains.

I did not expect any of this to become so complicated."

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New release news, behind-the-scenes from the heritage trail, and nothing you didn't ask for.

No spam. No drama. Just prairie news.

Chaunce Stanton, author

Chaunce Stanton writes cozy mysteries rooted in real places — specifically, the towns and landscapes of the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage trail across the Midwest. The Little Prairie Mysteries series follows Ellie Merritt, a Cedar Rapids–based content creator whose documentary channel keeps putting her in proximity to crimes.

The series is set in actual Wilder locations: Walnut Grove (Minnesota), Pepin (Wisconsin), Traer (Iowa), and beyond. The history is real. The murders are not.

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