I’m going fora new murder mystery novel this week – new as in not out until Thursday, so for once I’m ahead of the game. Mark your calendars, it’s not an April fool (that was yesterday!) and it may not happen again this year!
Daphne sends her family have left London behind and moved to Norfolk. Their new home is a a historic farmhouse in a seemingly idyllic village that even has a name to match – Pudding Corner. But when the primary school headteacher is found dead, Daphne realises that all is not what it seems. Daphne gets even more involved when one of her new friends is implicated – but Mr Papplewick was a on the verge of retirement after a career spent in the village – could some one from his past want him dead, or is it one of the other parents at the school?
I really enjoyed the setting and the characters, but I will avoid that I had the murderer pegged pretty early on, but I read a lot of murder mysteries and this is a debut. It sounds like they’re setting up for a series. So as I liked the premise so much, I will definitely comeback for more if more is offered to me. This is written by Paula Sutton, aka Instagram‘s Hill House Vintage and as well as the murder mystery this also has dollops of her vintage style. This has blurb comparisons to Richard Osman and Richard Coles and I think that’s pretty fair, but also some of the American cozies themed around hobbies and handicrafts.
My copy came from NetGalley, but is out on Thursday so you have a few days left to preorder a physical copy, kindle or kobo edition. As it’s not out yet and it’s a debut novel I V have no idea how easy it will be to get in the shops, but I will keep an eye out for it.
As ever I’m on the hunt for new cozy crime series, this week I thought I would finally publish this Recommendsday – which I have been working on for a literal year. Why has it taken so long? Well it’s been a bit hit and miss – I went on a bit of a request spree on NetGalley in 2023 looking for more series that way, I’ve been borrowing stuff from Kindle Unlimited. I’ve read a lot – and some of them… did not make the cut. And others of course started a total binge on the series – and I’ve written about them elsewhere!
Death Knells and Wedding Bells by Eva Gates*
This is the tenth in the series (although it’s the first of them I’ve read and also the first by the author) and it is an enjoyable murder mystery set around the wedding of the heroine and the murder of one of the guests in the aftermath. I felt it was a little heavy handed at times and I had the culprit pegged pretty early on – but I liked the setting and the set up and there were enough details filling in the backstory that I didn’t feel lost or like I was missing out. I would read more from this series.
In Farm’s Way by Amanda Flower*
This is the third in a series set in Michigan, where our heroine is Shiloh who has recently returned (at the start of the series) to try and save her family farm. I liked the setting and the characters, the mystery was well set up but I thought the solution was a bit rushed and surprising although it did make sense if you know what I mean. I found the characters’ dialogue a bit weird in places – some stuff gets contracted, but other stuff isn’t and there’s no pattern to it that I could find. But that may be because I’m a Brit and not from Michigan or the Mid West! It was nice to have a cozy set somewhere different though – this has ice fishing and lots of talk about the super cold winter weather.
Murder Served Neat by Michelle Hillen Klump*
This is the second in a series about a reporter-turned-mixologist (yeah, I know) and in this she stumbles across a murder while catering an event at This is the first book by this author that I have read and although the heroine’s love triangle gets quite wearing, the mystery portion is for the most part good. It could have used a little more wrapping up at the end – in terms of the other suspects and the reasons they were suspected (without giving too much away!) but it managed to tread the line between the heroine being too stupid to live and walking into danger quite well.
And that’s your lot. Fingers crossed that I find some more in the near future – whether it’s enough for another Recommendsday, or series to talk about on a Friday!
Another murder mystery pick this week – but after a forgotten classic last week, this week it’s a new release – and a debut at that.
Grave Expectations’s “detective” is Claire Hendricks – thirty something, a true crime fan and a medium. Yes really, a medium. She can see ghosts and one ghost in particular who follows her around – her best friend Sophie who has been haunting her since she was murdered when they were teenagers. Claire’s been booked as the entertainment at a family birthday party for one of her uni friends’ grandmothers. Except that at the party they find an unquiet ghost and set out to discover what happened with the two least unbearable members of the family to help them (neither of them are Claire’s uni mate) despite some scepticism.
I have written before about how I can never quite put my finger on what makes something with paranormal or supernatural elements work for for me and what doesn’t, but from the fact that I’ve picked this you’ve probably worked out that this one worked! I had a couple of issues with it, but they were minor ones. But basically this is a fun and funny cozy crime novel with a clever set up and a heroine with issues, and who I wished was a little bit less messy. But if this is the start of a series (and I hope it is) they’re minor quibbles that can be ironed out in the sequel.
This is Alice Bell’s debut and it’s already been picked by the Radio 2 book club, so hopefully it’ll be easy to get hold of – it’s a bargainous 99p on on Kindle as I write this, although it’s a bit more expensive on Kobo. My copy came from NetGalley – and I finished it just ahead of its release last week so I’ll be looking for it in the shops in the coming weeks.
Another week, another cozy crime pick. It feels like I’m coming off a run of romance picks onto a run of murder mystery ones. And looking at what I’ve been buying recently, this could continue for a while. Anyway, lets pack Past Verity on the back, because this is the book that I mentioned that I finished on Monday last week and nearly picked then, but restrained myself and chose The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras instead, which was clearly a smart choice, because I read another two in the series last week as well.
So, the set up: Goldy is a divorced mum of one, with an awful actually abusive ex-husband. To support herself and her son Arch after the divorce (her ex is bad at paying child support and she doesn’t want to have any more contact with him than she has to) she has started a catering company. In Catering to Nobody, Arch’s favourite teacher has been found dead and Goldy has been tasked with catering the wake. But at the event her former-father-in-law is taken violently ill and she’s accused of poisoning him. With the leftovers impounded, her kitchen shut down and her ex-husband loudly proclaiming her guilt all over town, Goldy sets out to clear her name and find out what really happened – and why.
This was published in 1990, so it’s even more vintage than the first Meg Langslow and slightly less vintage than the start of the Kinsey Milhone series (which I also love). There is something about the pre-mobile phone, pre-internet era that really just works for murder mystery plausibility. This is also set in small town Colorado and that works as well and is a bit different to California or the Eastern Seaboard states which are where a lot of the cozies I read are. Goldy is a great heroine and I really liked her friendship with her husband’s other ex-wife, Marla. I’m slightly annoyed that the cover says “Goldy Schulz Mysteries” on it – as in book one (and in fact until book four) Goldy’s surname is Bear (which inspires the name of her catering company – Goldilocks Catering, where everything is just right) so it’s giving away a bit of a plot development. But I forgive it because it’s really good – so good that I immediately read book two, and then book four because the series is so old they’re not all on Kindle and it takes a while for second hand books to arrive so I’ve given up on reading them in order for once.
The other thing that this has got going for it is that I really like the recipes. Diane Mott Davidson has included lots of them – not just baked goods but some of the other dishes that Goldy is making for the events she is catering (or just for her family) as well. There are a lot of cozy crimes with recipes and quite often, as a Brit, the recipes boggle my mind. But the books in this series that I have read so far have several that I am interested enough in to think that at some point I might try and convert the American recipes (a stick of butter? Cups of dry ingredients? How imprecise) and give them a go. Which is more than I usually think!
So, my copy of Catering to Nobody came from Kindle, but it’s also available on Kobo. Getting a paperback copy is going to be reliant on the secondhard market I think – if you’re in the US you might find it in a bookshop, but I think in the UK chances are fairly remote – the best cozy crime selection I’ve seen recently was the Waterstones Gower Street one – and they didn’t have any Diane Mott Davidson books at all.
This Friday it’s another cozy crime series – and another from Jenn McKinlay. I wrote about her Cupcake Bakery series about a year ago, and now we’re on the other side of the US with her Library Lovers one.
Our sleuth is Lindsey, library director in the small coastal town of Briar Creek. At the start of the start of the series she is recently arrived in town and getting to grips with her new job and the characters and rivalries at the library. As the series progresses Lindsey gets more and more established in town and develops a group of friends and love interests. Obviously there is also a murder each book – not always in the library thank goodness, because otherwise who would dare borrow a book – but some how Lindsey is always involved enough to start detecting – I mean it wouldn’t be a cozy otherwise, would it!
I’m only seven books in to the series – there are fourteen – because they’re relatively hard to get hold of over here – but so far there’s enough progression in the running strands to stop them getting repetitive (or annoying) and the murders are pretty varied too. I don’t like them as much as I like the Cupcake mysteries, but they still make for a nice comforting read when you need that sort of thing.
If you’re in the US, you should be able to get hold of them fairly easily. If you’re in the UK, it’s trickier because they’re not available on Kindle if you have a UK account. But I think I have spotted them in bookshops on occasion- and obviously Amazon have the paperbacks…
New year (yes it’s still a new year even if we’ve hit the middle of the month), new cozy crime series for me and something different to talk about in today’s BotW. And you know I love a cozy crime series. So here we go.
A High-End Finish is the first in a series of cozy crimes featuring Shannon Hammer, a contractor specialising in Victorian homes in her town of Lighthouse Cove on the Northern California coast. In this first book, Shannon finds a dead body in the basement of a house that she’s working on – and becomes a suspect in a murder inquiry as she went on a blind date with the victim a few days earlier – and was heard threatening him after he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The town’s new police chief doesn’t seem inclined to believe that she had nothing to do with the murder, so Shannon starts investigating herself with the help of her friends, her nosy neighbours and a crime writer who has just moved to town.
This is a really nice set up for a new series but because there are a lot of characters to introduce and backstories to set up, the detecting is not quite as well developed as you would like and I thought the solution was a bit, ho hum. BUT I really liked Shannon, her friends and the town itself so I forgive it – because first books in series are often like this – either they don’t do a good enough job of setting up the side characters or the mystery isn’t as good as you want it to be. This usually settles down in book two – especially if it’s an established author starting a new series (which Kate Carlisle is). Luckily I picked up the next book in the series (in fact the whole series so far) second hand last month (as seen in Books Incoming) so it’s a good thing I liked them and I can also go straight on to book two to see if the problems get ironed out.
It is nice to have a home improvement/contractor theme for a cozy series though – as previously mentioned, I’m a bit cookery cozied out, and as I’m not usually into the supernatural sometimes it feels like there aren’t a lot of choices for me beyond that. Still hopefully these will keep me busy for a few weeks (at least).
As previously mentioned, my copy of A High-End Finish came via one of my Facebook book groups, but they’re available on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. As they’re American Mass Market Paperbacks though, you may have trouble finding them in stores in the UK – so your best bet might be ordering from Book Depository or similar.
This would have been a couple of weeks ago – if it wasn’t for the pesky end of the month, because it was inspired by the first book I’m going to talk about and then spun me off into a series I love post for a series I’d forgotten all about! You wouldn’t think that a vicar solving mysteries would be a thing, and then you remember Father Brown and realise that you’re being a bit stupid! Vicars or vicar’s spouses are in a perfect position to try and solve murders – they have an excuse for being nosy and getting involved in the aftermath of a sudden death.
Murder before Evensong by the Reverend Richard Coles
Former Communard turned Vicar and Strictly contestant, Reverend Richard Coles’ debut crime novel is features a body in a church in the aftermath of a proposal to install a toilet in the church. It’s not entirely clear at the start when the story is set, which made for a bit of confusion for me when references popped up to Tenko and To the Manor Born and was finally cleared up (for me at least) as being 1988 because of a reference to Celine Dion winning Eurovision! It’s an enjoyable read with a lot of fun village characters and a good mystery. I think it would appeal to people who enjoyed Richard Osman’s novels – but if you’ve ever been involved in church life or a PCC then this will have an extra level of enjoyment for you too.
The Max Tudor series by G M Maliet
I’ve mentioned the Max Tudor series here before, but it has been a while. Max is a former MI5 agent who has become a vicar and across the seven book series solves murders in his parish and then in the surrounding area, helping out the local police. There’s a running romantic plot strand and a cast of regular characters in the village too. I’ve read all seven, mostly in a paperback editions via the library or The Works, so I’m not sure how easy they are to find in bookshops at the moment – but they’re easy to get hold of on kindle.
The Ministry is Murder series by Emilie Richards
Now these are likely to be the hardest to get hold of in the UK – because they’re older, not on kindle and as far as I can tell only come in US mass market paperback format, but I like them a lot so I’m including them. oh and they’re a bit of a cheat because Aggie Sloan Wilcox is the vicar’s wife, but hey, all the action in the ones I’ve read revolves around the church and it’s congregation. Aggie’s husband made church is in a small town in Ohio and she gets involved in solving her first murder because he’s a suspect. Aggie – real name Agate – has an eccentric mother amongst the supporting cast as well as the parishioners. I’ve read three of the five – and the series has provided my Ohio book in the 50 States challenge the last few years!
Francis Oughterard by Suzette A Hill
Now these are tricky to write about without spoilers. So what I’m going to say echos the blurb – Francis is a vicar in the 1950s and all he wants is a quiet life. But somehow he keeps getting entangled in murders. These are more suspense than mystery, but they are laugh out loud funny and more than a touch surreal. There are five books featuring Francis – which I’ve read – and two featuring his niece – which I haven’t. My library used to hold copies of most of these – but I actually read them on kindle, which seems like the only place to get the final two books.
In other books, there’s also Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose, which as I said in the June Book Deals post, I first read as part of my history degree and features a monk solving some gruesome crimes. And obviously the other famous crime solving monk is Cadfael, but I haven’t read any of them – yes, yes I’ll get to it at some point.
So as you know from the weekly lists, I’m on a big old re-read of Phryne Fisher mysteries at the moment, so I’ve taken my inspiration for this week’s Recommendsday from that!
A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill
Lets start with something set just after Phryne – the first book in the Rowland Sinclair series is set in the 1930s. Like Phryne, Rowland is spending money and causing scandal – he’s the son of a well-to-do Sydney family – but rather than embracing a life of gentlemanly pursuits, he’s an artist. I’ve only read one of this series, I have the second book on the kindle and a couple more on the physical to read pile (see Books Incoming) but the first one sees Rowland investigating the death of his uncle – the only other Bohemian-y member of the family. This has politics and tensions and you see some of the same factors you see on the rise in Europe at the same time at play in Australia. It’s not witty like Phryne, and it’s further towards the thriller end of the spectrum than the cozy, but I liked it (as you can tell from the fact I have more waiting to be read!
Murder in the Telephone Exchange by June Wright
This was a really interesting murder mystery, written in the late 1940s and set in an Australian telephone exchange: When Maggie finds one of her unpopular colleagues with her head smashed in, she finds herself drawn into the mystery – not just because she was the person who found the body, but because she’s not sure that the police are on the right track. But soon the danger is increasing and someone else turns up dead. I read this a couple of years ago and loved the setting, liked Maggie, I though the mystery was clever and tense and packed with suspense. I’ve been looking for something else set in a telephone exchange ever since. And then…
A Matter of Love and Death by Carmen Radtke
I read this the other week: and it’s a murder mystery with a telephone exchange! Frances overhears a threatening message while she’s on shift at the exchange and thinks it might be linked to a robbery where a man died that she sees in the paper a few days later. Along with her family’s new lodger Phil and nightclub owner Jack, they decide to investigate. This is the first in a series that has gone through several covers and a change in author name and is trying to do quite a lot, but it was in Kindle Unlimited and wasn’t a total bust!
I’m fairly sure I read a contemporary murder mystery set in the outback not that long ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called or who wrote it, so I can’t look up what I thought of it on Goodreads! And I called this Antipodean mysteries – so I ought to mention a New Zealand-set book or two – so here’s a reminder that Ngaio Marsh set some of the Inspector Alleyn series in her home country. Vintage Murder sees Roderick investigating a murder at a cast party after the first night of a play. He is somewhat taken with the leading lady – which always makes me smile because this is the trip to that he’s on ship home from when he meets Agatha Troy in the next book in the series (Artists in Crime). Marsh sends Alleyn back to New Zealand during the Second World War and that’s where we get Colour Scheme – victim lured into boiling mud (yuck), complete with espionage and counter espionage – and Dyed in the Wool – a country house-style murder mystery but set on a farm and where the victim turns up packed in a bale of wool (also yuck). And even later in the series there is Photo Finish, with an opera diva who is taken to an island by her boyfriend to escape the paparazzi, where she plans a performance of a piece written specially for her by her younger lover and who is then murdered. And an honourable mention should go to A Surfeit of Lampreys, which starts off in New Zealand before the action moves to London and the murder happens, and Opening Night (also known as Night at the Vulcan) where the leading lady is newly arrived from New Zealand.
Pinch, punch, first day of the month, white rabbits etc. Welcome to February everyone. Despite the fact that January is my birthday month, it does always feel like a bit of a slog to get to the end of the month, but we’ve made it through and into Freburary, which always feels like it rattles by at speed. All the usual goodies coming up on the blog this week – monthly stats, mini reviews etc. But first: a book of the week review.
In a week that saw most of my “reading” actually be revisiting audiobooks that I have listened to before, mostly from series that I have already written about so it’s a good thing that this was really good – even if it’s a sort of rule breaker because it’s not a first in series book! This is the third in the Ministry is Murder series, which features a Minister’s wife in small town Ohio. There are five books in the series – the newest of which is from 2010. In Beware False Profits, Aggie and her husband’s trip to New York is disrupted when a member of their congregation goes missing on a work trip there. And when they get back to Emerald Springs, the mayor’s wife is murdered at an event for the local foodbank – which is run by the missing man.
What I really like about Aggie is that she has an excuse for snooping – as a minister’s wife she has an excuse for being involved in the locals lives – especially as you need to keep your congregation happy to keep your job. And that’s another reason I like the series – it’s an insight into a way of life. I nearly wrote a profession, but that felt wrong – even though Aggie isn’t the one with a vocation, it’s her husband. I should add that it’s definitely not a Christian cozy – because I read one of those at the end of last year and this doesn’t have the detail of the sermons or biblical verses to reflect of that that did. Anyway there are a lot of cozy crimes featuring bakers and small businesses and the like and although Aggie also has a side line in house flipping, the ministry side of things gives it a nice twist. And the actual mysteries that need to be solved are good too. All in all a very nice way to spend an afternoon or two on the sofa.
Now because these are an older cozy (and boy does it feel weird to be saying that about something that was published this century!) they’re not available in Kindle – so in the UK you’re likely to be looking at picking them up from Amazon or second hand. I found the first in this series in a second hand bookshop – I think maybe one at a National Trust house, but subsequently I’ve bought from Amazon when the prices have been acceptable – I see that the first two at the moment are insanely expensive there though. So maybe one to add to your list to watch out for the next time you’re mooching around a charity shop!
Happy Friday everyone! It’s the end of another week and I am back with another series I love post. Yesterday I was talking about my search for a new historical cozy crime series, so today I’m doing one of my reliable favourite contemporary cozy mystery series.
So Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery series follows Mel Cooper and her friend Angie DeLaura as they run the Fairytale Cupcake Bakery. Along with their friend Tate, they’ve been stumbling across bodies for thirteen books now, with a fourteenth due this year. I’ve read eleven of them as you can see from the photo, which is – unusually for me – somewhat out of order*. Over the course of the series the cast of secondary regular characters and getting the bakers out and about so that you’re not constantly wondering how a cupcake bakery can stay in business if a bodies keep turning there!
You mostly see the action from Mel’s perspective, but because you have the trio of main characters, you’re able to get personal life developments for each of them – which also helps the series avoid falling into the pitfalls of an endless love triangle for the heroine (see Steph Plum) or an endless on off relationship for the heroine (see Agatha Raisin) or marrying the heroine off very quickly and landing her with kids the author doesn’t know what to do with! The complexity of the murders can vary a little – depending on how much running plot stuff is going on – but they pretty much always manage to avoid the Too Stupid To Live pitfall, although Mel and or Angie do find themselves one on one with the murderer at the denouement with alarming regularity!
But as a calming way to pass a few hours, they are fairly hard to beat. I keep meaning to try out one of the cupcake recipes at the end, but the combination of having to turn the measurements into British (how much *is* a stick of butter in metric?) and the fact there are only two of us in our household and cupcakes need eating quickly means that I’ve never got around to it. They do always sound like they should taste good though – which isn’t a given for cozy crime recipes.
When I started buying these, they were only available in the American mass market paperback editions that you see in the photo. But the good news (for you, not me because now I’ve started in physical copies you know I’ll carry on**) is that you can now get most of them in Kindle!
Happy Reading!
* and yes it does bug me that the spines changed mid series and so they don’t all match.
** yes, I did indeed buy book 12 while I was writing this post!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 