It’s Friday again and I’m back with only my second post about a mystery series this year.
This is a small town cozy crime series with a literary twist – there are six books in the series and I’ve read five of them. At the start of the series, in A Dark and Stormy Murder (which was a BotW back in the autumn of 2024) Lena London is an aspiring suspense author who moves to Blue Lake in Indiana because she’s just landed her dream job as assistant to her favourite author Camilla Graham who is based there. As it’s a mystery series bodies start to turn up and there are love interests and the first book also sets up a running back story mystery that needs solving involving a secondary character.
Unlike a lot of mystery series, Lena actually choses between her love interests pretty early and the running mystery isn’t dragged out too long either. Julia Buckley introduces new regulars as the series goes on too which helps broaden the world and introduce new avenues for corpses to appear – although the same person is the prime suspect in the first three mysteries for reasons related to the running side plot. Blue Lake is a nice setting and Lena’s status as a new arrival, albeit from not far away and with a friend living in the town, means that you get explanations of who is who and what is what pretty naturally in the narrative, which isn’t always the case.
The fifth book did feel like a bit of a shift from the other four with a missing person and a (possibly) evil corporation coming to town rather than a body and I didn’t like it as much. I think the series probably did need to do something a little bit different but the direction of the plot felt a bit confused and like the book couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to move towards a more cozy thriller type thing. Number six (aka the one I haven’t read) has a different cover style and is significantly more expensive and isn’t linked to the previous five on Amazon so I suspect that it may be a different publisher, which maybe suggests that the previous one didn’t work as well for other people two.
That said the first four books in this series are good, well plotted mystery stories with a nice setting and a good cast of characters and are worth a look if you see them around. Unlike a lot of the cozy series I read these are available as ebooks on Kindle and Kobo, and I’ve picked up a couple of these from the Big Waterstones in Picadilly, so they’re easier to find than some of the mass market series I read.
Have a great weekend!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 