For most of my decade-plus career as a published mystery novelist, I’ve worked in what I call my “accidental office,” a converted breakfast nook that sits off the kitchen in our 1930 house in Columbus, Ohio.

With a four-year-old daughter and a full-time day job, I’ve resigned myself to writing on the go a great deal of the time: perched atop a barn rail while my daughter trots her horse around the ring for her weekly lesson, on my lunchbreak, in various waiting rooms, airports, or train stations, or at the coffee shop down the street from my daughter’s school.

On May 1, 2020, in the middle of the COVID lockdown, I purchased an 1865 Second Empire Victorian. Evidently, pestilence, death, and possible unemployment wasn’t enough stress for me.

A fun fact I learned when researching my latest eco-mystery for children, The Owl Prowl Mystery, is that great horned owls don’t make their own nests. Instead, they often take over the nests of other birds or squirrels. I thought of great horned owls when I became...