It’s election day in the UK tomorrow, and I’m gearing up for an all-nighter at work. So the natural way to prepare is to… read some nice relaxing cozy crime books that don’t feature any politics at all! Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed recently.
I think I’ve mentioned these before, but Donna Andrew’s Meg Langslow books are a lasting source of delight to me. They have some of the best punny titles in the genre (all based around birds) and are witty and fun. There was a slight mid series slump* (but hey where there are 20 books in a series that can happen) but they’re back on form now. Start at the beginning with Murder with Peacocks – I’ve recently read numbers 17 and 18 – the brilliantly titled The Good, the Bad and the Emus and The Nightingale before Christmas.
I’ve also got a serious soft spot for Cindy Brown’s Ivy Meadows series about a wannabe actress who is a trainee Private Investigator in her spare time. Each book is based around a different play or musical title – the fourth book has just come out, Ivy Get Your Gun, and I enjoyed it although I think the second book in the series The Sound of Murder is still my favourite.
I read my first book in Lyn Cahoon’s Tourist Trap series a few weeks ago and, although there were a few things that had me confused, I already have another one lined up on my Kindle so I must have liked it. This follows the trend for small business-owner detectives with a Bookshop-cum-coffee-shop proprietor in a small coastal town. I like a competent heroine and Jill is good at her day job – or at least she by the eighth book in the series Hospitality and Homicide and she at least has a credible reason for investigating the death. There’s an interesting supporting cast and a nice relationship to watch develop too. What more could you want?
I bought the Donna Andrews – and you can get them fairly easily (and for a sensible price) in the UK, but the other copies came to me via NetGalley, so it might be a case of adding them to your book wishlists and waiting for the price to drop, because I often find American cozies are too expensive for me soon after release, especially given how quickly I read them.
Happy Reading – and if you’re up watching the election result tomorrow night, think of me and my colleagues working probably the busiest nightshift of the year!
*SPOILER ALERT: The slump (for me at least) coincided with the period where Meg’s twins were very small. Once they got to toddling and the books had less feeding and naps, it all sorted itself out
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
The cover for The Good, The Bad, and the Emus is hilarious!! I love it! I am going to add that series to my TBR right away. A friend of mine and I love to go to one of our local grocery stores where they have a decently sized book section (we’re both bookworms) and browse through the book deals, and check out the titles of the cozy mysteries. It makes for a fun few minutes as we read them back and forth to each other.
There’s something about a good pun in the title isn’t there. I’m amazed how many bird ones Andrews has managed to come up with now she’s switched over to them (the first ones were all Murder with…). In fact, I’m amazed how many puns the genre manages in general!
I looked through the list of the books in the series, and she came up with some very clever ones. That’s probably hard to do after awhile just using birds, so hats off to her!