An October drive to a nearby small town yielded the attached persimmon harvest. I found several seeds on the ground. I heard one persimmon fall to the ground and collected it. Curious, given there's not yet been frost here, I reached up to test several still on the tree. I found one that was ripe and plucked it. The persimmon was ripe and sweet, not astringent. There goes another "must have frost" myth, especially interesting given we're in the south.
Update 08Oct2025 While reading chapters 5-7 in Natasha C Sass's How to Write A Cozy Mystery, she confirms: don't introduce new characters or places in what she call Acts 3 and 4 of a cozy, making my point.
Although deus ex machina didn't show up in Elliott Ackerman's novel, it probably does show up in the next mystery, recommended by a friend, that I read: The NYT best seller The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman.
In the last 75 pages, the protagonists travel outside of England to Nicosia to meet with a patriarch Demir Gundoz (interesting last name). His son Johnny is introduced late in the mystery, a form of deus ex machina. Most cozy mysteries have characters travel from the British countryside to London, in comparison. Break the rules! seems to reign supreme in mysteries.
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Osman ends the mystery with more than one demise.
