Tag: cozy crime series

first in series, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: First in mystery series

veritywilde

It’s the middle of the week again and I’m back with some more murder mysteries, but this time they’re the first books in their series.

Grime and Punishment by Jill Churchill

After picking up two later books in this series earlier this year, I’m now going back and getting more and have acquired the first one. Book two, Farewell to Yarns was a BotW in May, but in Grime and Punishment Jane is trying to solve the murder of a cleaning lady in the house next door because the suspects include a lot of her friends. Often in a first in a series there is too much set up and the book can suffer, either from just having too much going on or from the mystery not being quite good enough. This isn’t one of those – it manages to introduce the group and Jane very naturally and the mystery is sufficiently twisty.

Murder on the Mountain by Ellie Alexander

After having enjoyed Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series, I was interested to read this first one in a different series from her – a re-release and retitle of something she had previously released under a different pseudonym. Our heroine is Meg, a journalist who scores a job at an outdoors magazine, where she’s definitely trying to fake it till she makes it because her outdoor skills are practically nil. The murder in this one is of a contestant in an outdoor competition TV show, but in the background is the death of Meg’s father (an investigative journalist) in mysterious circumstances while working on an expose. I didn’t love this – I found Meg a real trial because she is almost aggressively clueless about the outdoors, and about a few other things in the story. However as these are in Kindle Unlimited, I’ll probably give the second one a go to see if it improves any once all the series set up is over with. However, given this was Alexander’s first ever series, and I don’t know how much reworking of it she’s done, it may just be that Alexanders writing has changed since she wrote these!

Beaches, Bungalows and Burglaries by Tonya Kappes

Mae West’s (no, not that one) life has taken a turn – her much older husband has turned out to be a conman, he’s in jail, she’s divorced him and all his assets have been seized. So instead of a life of luxury, she’s got to start over and all she has is am RV and campground in Normal, Kentucky which her husband put in her name years ago. So she heads to Normal to start over, but finds that the community there is suffering because of her husband too. Then he turns up – not in prison, but dead in the lake at the campsite and suddenly she’s a suspect. I found this while I was looking for books for my missing states for the 50 states challenge this year, and didn’t realise that I’d read one of Kappes’ series years ago when she was being published by Henery press back when they were in a really good groove of easy, fun cozy crime. And this is slightly ridiculous (and the recipes at the end are awful) but it’s a pretty fun read, with a good set up for a series. If you’re a KU member, it’s worth a read, but I have no idea how Kappes has get this set up going for *checks* more than 40 books! I suspect that I’ll read a few more to see because long series are so hard to pull off!

Christmas books, Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow at Christmas

veritywilde

Happy Friday everyone, and also happy New Meg Langslow week. Book 38 (!), Five Golden Wings, is out this week and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about why the Meg Christmas books are among my favourite festive themed novels – and in fact are some of the few festive related titles that I actively look forward to.

If you’ve missed my previous appreciations of the series, Meg Langslow is a blacksmith and town organiser in a small town in Virginia called Caerphilly. She has a retired-actor-turned-professor husband and a set of twins and an enormous and eccentric extended family. The series exists in what I call the Floating Now, where time does pass, but not at the same rate as it has passed in real life, but modern developments are incorporated as if there were there all along. See also Charles Paris who has been in his early 50s since the 1970s and is still in them now except that his bedsit is now a studio apartment and he has a smartphone tear her than an answer machine.

Donna Andrews is continuing to write two a year, and after 25 years they’re still great. And don’t get me wrong, I love the non-Christmas ones, but in a world where every year there are more Christmas themed books, be it murder mystery or romance, hers are a cut above. Whether it’s her family descending on her for the season, a storm, or another Caerphilly festive event, Andrews keeps managing to thing of festive scenarios to put the characters in for Meg to stumble across a corpse.

I try my hardest to save them and savour them, but it is hard. The good news is that compared to when I first started to buy them, they’re much easier to get hold of now because they’re on Kindle in the UK, which they weren’t back in 2013 when I first read Murder with Peacocks.

Anyway, my first festive read is still a few weeks away because I do try and get past Halloween before I start on them, but if you’re in the market for some tinsel already, then you could do a lot worse!

Have a great weekend!

mystery, series

Series Update: Secret Bookcase

veritywilde

So back in November last year I did a post about Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series after the release of book four, but this week the final book in the series, A Body at the Book Fair, came out and I wanted to return for a quick update. First a recap of the set up: Annie works at a specialist mystery bookshop in a small town in California, but she actually trained as a criminologist before her best friend was murdered during their final project. In each book in the series she’s solving a murder of the week, but also inching closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her friend.

Back in November, I was getting fed up with waiting for the resolution of the murder and enjoying the murders of the week more. And as the series went on on, the mysteries the books have been trying to solve seemed to get less complex because of the need to move the other story on. But until the final instalment, the books had had mostly been satisfying on one front or the other: either the murder of the week was good or the progress on the background investigation made up for it. But in book six I’m not sure either side of the story works – the mystery-of-the-week is very thin, and the background mystery felt a bit anticlimactic too, for reasons which I can’t really explain without giving you spoilers.

At the end of the final book there is a note from Ellie Alexander saying that there is a spin off series coming in 2026 called The Novel Detectives, featuring Annie and her friends. And as I still like the characters and the set up, I’m hoping that this will be much more of a the murder of the week but with developments in their personal lives as the running strand and will get back to what I liked about the earlier books. I’ll be looking out for the first one anyway and will keep you posted!

previews, series

Series Redux: Fixer Upper Mysteries

veritywilde

Number 11 in the Fixer-Upper series – The Knife Before Christmas came out on Tuesday – and as I said in the Christmas series post, this one getting a hardback release, which is new thing for the series and probably a positive sign for the health of the series. And as I do love a series of mysteries about house renovating I thought I’d take an opportunity to talk about them, especially as this is probably the best of the construction-set mystery series that I’ve read – because (and this is a common theme with series that I like) the lead character is good at her job, and her competence (or otherwise) isn’t really used as a plot point.

Our detective is Shannon Hammer, who runs a building contractors in a small town on the California coast. Over the course of the series she’s worked on all sorts of buildings – as Lighthouse Cove has plenty of historic buildings of various types and Kate Carlisle has been able to invent more when necessary without it seeming weird! Shannon has a solid group of friends at the start of the series and has added a love interest as well – which has been a pretty slow burn, which again I like because it’s annoying when (mostly) heroines are married off fast because authors seem to find it harder to find scenarios to put them into after that point – particularly when kids appear for female leads. The blurb for this one has her working at a hotel in the town who are famous for their events between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The family of the owners are less keen on the festivities than their parents are, on account of their potential inheritance – and then of course someone turns up dead. It sounds like a lot of fun – and it’s a shame that I’ll probably have to wait a bit to read it, on account of that non-matching hardback. Hey ho. I’ll get there in the end though.

You can buy it now though, if you’re a kindle reader or don’t mind that non-matching thing – here are the Kindle and Kobo links. You probably won’t be able to find the book in shops – I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in a UK store, but you should be able to order it in.

Have a great weekend!

cozy crime, detective, Series I love

Series I Love: Maine Clambake mysteries

veritywilde

I wrote about this series briefly back in 2022 as a bingeable series, but we’re two years on now and I’ve read eleven of the twelve in the series and I want to upgrade it to a series I love!

Our heroine is Julia Snowden, who grew up in the small Maine town of Busman’s Harbor then moved away for college and to work in finance and then returned at the start of the series to help her family’s struggling business. That’s the clambake of the series title, which is on an island a short boat ride from the town, which her family has owned for several generations. The first mystery is set on the island, but there’s enough building out of the world that there are plenty of options for murder locations (and victims) so that Julia’s business doesn’t start to seem cursed and you wonder how they are staying in business!

One of the things that I particularly like about the series is that it shows the seasonal life of the town – with the frantically busy summer season as the locals try to make the maximum possible from the influx of tourists and then the quieter winter months where many people have to find other sources of income to sustain them until the weather improves again. It also touches on issues like gentrification and modernisation and the impact of the loss of traditional industries on coastal towns like Busman’s Harbor.

Beyond Julia there is a large cast of regulars, including her mother, her sister and her sister’s family, but also others that I don’t want to mention because it’s going to be spoilery. Suffice it to say that Julia builds out a nice life for herself in the town and that Barbara Ross resists the urge to marry her off quickly to an obvious love interest. And we know how much I like that in a cozy series – see also Meg Langslow and Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery and Library Lovers series.

Now eleven of the twelve have recently* dropped into Kindle Unlimited which makes it a great time to have a good old binge on them. The twelfth only came out in April, and there’s no announcement yet for a thirteen so we probably have about nine months at least to wait for another installment.

Have a great weekend everyone

*I mean recently enough that I’ve only just noticed despite having the ones I hadn’t read on more than one of my Amazon wishlists.