Tag: cozy crime

Book of the Week, cozy crime, new releases

Book of the Week: The Potting Shed Murder

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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.

Happy Reading!

books, series

Mystery series: Max Tudor

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Happy Friday everyone! Here in the UK it’s a bank holiday for Good Friday so I’m taking the opportunity to write about a murder mystery series featuring a vicar!

Max is a former MI5 agent turned vicar, who is now parish priest in an idyllic village on the south-west coast of England. He was hoping to escape his past, but he’s still attracting more attention than he would like from his female parishioners. The ex-spy situation gives Max a really good reason to be involved in investigating deaths, including ones where he doesn’t stumble across the body himself. Across the course of eight books Max has found his place in the village and started a family of his own, which poses its own challenges too.

I really like Max as a character and the options for stories that his backstory provides. Plus the secondary characters are interesting and the setting is charming. They’re often a little darker than some other cosy mysteries, but there’s the solutions aren’t usually as unexpectedly dark as, say, the Dandy Gilver series often turn out to be. I haven’t read the latest book because, well you’ve seen the state of the tbr pile, and I haven’t seen it in a store yet, and you all know that’s when I find it hardest to resist buying books!

If you want more cosy crime mysteries that are vicar adjacent, you might want to check out the ministry is murder series, although they added a little harder to get hold of than Max Tudor is, as the latest Max book came out last year. And they don’t have vicars, but G M Malliet has a couple of other series that you can check out too.

Have a great weekend!

series

Mystery series: Tj Jensen

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Today for the series post, I’m coming back to a series I mentioned on my book from in the Thanksgiving books post back in November, but now I’ve read the whole lot so it’s time to talk in more depth!

Our heroine is Tj, a high school teacher and sports coach in Paradise Nevada, who lives on her family’s resort with her two much younger half sisters. Their mum is dead and Tj has taken over as their parental figure. As with most of these series, Tj has a love interest and a solid group of secondary characters around her to keep things interesting and provide her with sidekicks for her sleuthing. Despite the fact that someone dies in every book, Paradise seems like a pretty nice place to live, and Tj herself is a fun, not too stupid to live heroine, even though she’s quite young in the grand scheme of things.

There are ten books in the series and they move through the seasons with the resort – so there are summer and winter weather books as well as books around the various seasonal festivals (Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas) so it doesn’t seem to much like there are bodies falling out of every corner at Tj and her friends. I found these incredibly easy to read – I started reading them via NetGalley when Henery Press had their books on there and were going through a pretty reliable period. And since then I’ve been able to pick off the rest of them either via Kindle Unlimited or as a bargain deal and the good news is that they’re all in KU at the moment. So if you fancy a solid murder mystery that’s not too gory, these are a pretty good way to pass a couple of hours. Kathi Daley has written a couple of other series – but I haven’t had a chance to read any of them yet, but they are on the list!

Have a great weekend everyone!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Fresh Starts

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Happy Wednesday everyone, I’m back with a few more book recommendations for you, and because it is starting to feel spring like, which means spring cleaning and clear outs, this week’s theme is books with people making fresh starts.

Obviously romance novels are full of these, with tonnes of heroines moving to small towns to start over, so that’s where I’m starting! there are a lot of small town romance series that have elements of this, but it’s not a given because lots of them feature people finding love with people they’ve known all their lives. So if small town fresh starts are what you’re after, try Jill Shalvis’s Simply Irresistible, the first in her Lucky Harbor series, which actually has a fair few escapes to a new place type plots. This one has a heroine who has left LA for a fresh start and to claim an inheritance. The hero is the contractor she hires to help fix up the inheritance. And Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series also features some new starts, although I’ve only read the first one and found the hero a little too alpha-y for my taste. If you want something really gentle, Debbie Macomber’s Dakota series from the early 2000s is very low stakes from what I remember, and super easy to read.

If you want a historical romance with a fresh start, Beverly Jenkins’s Tempest features a heroine who moves across the country to marry a man she’s never met, on the strength of their correspondence with each other – I’m not sure starts get much fresher than that! Anyway, Regan is a fantastic heroine and I really enjoyed both the romance and the bits where she was establishing herself in the new town. Jenkins did this so well – earlier in the same series is Tempest, is Forbidden, whose hero is a little too alpha for me and heroine a little too sweet, but I know that is personal preference. And Jenkins of course wrote the Blessings series, where the heroine buys a whole town and brings it back to life.

There are also loads of cosy crime series that start with the sleuth moving to somewhere new – Jenn McKinley’s Library Lovers is one of these for a start, as is M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, although a warning on the latter, I can’t read too many (or even more than one now) in a row because the formula is very strong in these and you notice it a lot.

There are a couple of former books of the week that fit here to – like Well Met by Jen DeLuca, the first in her Renaissance Faire series, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph – which is completely different to anything what I have mentioned in this part so far. And then there are a bunch of books that feature fresh starts that I still have on the to read pile, waiting for me to get around to – like Linda Holmes’s Flying Solo, Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two,

Happy Humpday!

bingeable series, Series I love

Series I Love: Goldy Schulz

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It’s just over a year since the first book in this series was Book of the Week, and now I’ve read nearly all the books in the series that I can get at a sensible price, so it seemed like a good time to write a series post about them!

At the start of the series, Goldy is a recently divorced single mum running a one woman catering business in a town in Colorado. Her biggest problem is her ex-husband, John Robert Korman aka the Jerk (so named for his initials), gynaecologist and wife beater. In the first book Goldy’s former father in law drops dead at a wake that she is catering and she becomes a suspect. And this is just the first murder Goldy stumbles across in the course of her catering business. They’re not always under suspicion of being poisoned by her food, but in a fair number of cases they could have been – at least initially!

In my BotW post for that first book, Catering to Nobody, I noted my annoyance that the series title gives away a future plot development in the series – aka that Goldy has a different surname and that she gets married again (and to someone you meet in that first book), and I appreciate that I am doing the same here, but that’s how you’re going to find them easiest. And finding these is some of the challenge, because this is a series that started in 1990…

I bought everything I could on Kindle – but as you can see from this picture, of the seventeen books only six of them are on Kindle (in the UK at least) and then the rest I have acquired second hand. And that’s where I have come undone – because some of them are super expensive or impossible to get. I’ve read 13 of the 17, and have one more in the post on the way. But as I’ve read the last book in the series – or at least I assume it’s the last because it came out more than a decade ago – so I’m going for the series post now.

And what I really like about these is the group of regular characters that pop up – as well as Goldy and her son Arch, there is also Tom who she marries, Julian who is almost an adopted son and then Marla, the Jerk’s other ex wife. Between Goldy and the side characters there are plenty of ways to be involved in murders and to get information about them. Also it has recipes. And some of them are recipes that you might want to cook, and actually be able to cook even with the American measurements! I was trying to think of a series to compare them to, but I struggled a little bit – they’re not necessarily funny or witty like some of the other mystery series I like, but they’re not super scary or thriller-y either. I’ll keep thinking!

As I said, these can be a bit of a challenge to get hold of, but here’s the link to the Kindle series list to get you started.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books, new releases

Book of the Week: The Queen of Poisons

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As I mentioned yesterday, lots of rereading on last week’s list, so options for BotW were somewhat limited – and this is a bit of a rule breaker again because it’s the third in the series. But hey, what can you do.

When the mayor of Marlow drops dead in a council meeting, one of the Marlow Murder club is actually a witness. Suzie’s sitting in the gallery of the planning meeting when Geoffrey Lushington collapses. And not just that – this time the police are using Judith, Becks and Susie as civilian advisors from the start so they don’t have to guess about the details of the investigation. But the mayor seems like a nice guy – who would want to kill him?

These fit squarely into the wave of mysteries that have popped up in the wake of the success of the Thursday Murder Club. I mean it’s even got murder club in the title! But what makes the Marlow lot different is that it’s written by Robert Thorogood who is the creator of the TV series Death in Paradise and who had already written four novels based on that series before he started with Judith, Suze and Becks. I think they’re more straightforward cozy crimes than the Osman’s are, but they’re fun and easy to read and not too dark. Plus they’re set in a place that I used to know fairly well and that’s always fun.

I realise that this is more a review of the series in general than the book, but I can’t say much more about the murder plot without giving too much away (although I found the solution this time less satisfying than the previous ones) and I can’t say too much about what’s going on alongside the murder without giving too much away about the previous books in the series. But I do think you could read this without having read any of the others and not feel like you’ve missed out too much.

My copy came from NetGalley but this came out in hardback ten days or so ago and I think it’ll be fairly easy to find in the shops – the others certainly have been. And of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo. There is a TV adaptation of the first book coming soon as well so if you’re a read the books before you watch the series person, now is your chance.

Happy Reading.

books, series

Cozy Crime series: Ministry is Murder

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Happy Friday everyone, the good news is it’s time for the first series post of the year. The bad news is that I’m going to have to find another book to read for Ohio in next year’s 50 States Challenge – if I do it again next year, which is never a given despite the fact that 2024 is year five!

Anyway, today I’m talking about Emilie Richards’s Ministry is Murder series, about Aggie Sloan Wilcox, a minister’s wife in the small town of Emerald Springs, Ohio. Aggie isn’t a traditional minister’s wife – not just because she keeps stumbling across murders (although she does do that) but because she’s not going to make her husband’s job her full time job, no matter what the parishioners think – she’s got children to raise and being a minister doesn’t pay that well. But being a minister’s wife does mean than when she stumbles across bodies she has reason to be some what involved – especially if they’re parishioners!

They’re cozy mysteries – so relatively blood and gore-less, and the murdered person is usually someone you don’t like (or like less the more you know about them) and although the church and the church community is the setting for them, they’re not overly religious or preachy – I mean there’s no bible quotes popping up left right and centre. They’re really easy to read and very soothing in their way – despite the murders!

There are five books in there series and I wish there were more, because I think there could have been more plots – the house flipping strand, kid schools, rival churches all could have been exploited more. But as the last one came out in 2010, clearly I’m hoping in vain! Still Emilie Richards has written a lot of other books, so hopefully there’s something else in her catalogue that I’ll enjoy.

I bought the four I have secondhand – because that seemed to be the only way to get them. I read the first one as an ebook, but I can’t find them anywhere to buy anymore so not quite sure what the deal with that is. But if you spot them out and about they’re worth a look.

Happy Reading!

bingeable series, series

Bingeable series: Aurora Teagarden

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It’s the run up to Halloween, so I was thinking that I probably ought to try and do a spooky or vampire-y series post at some point this month. Trouble is, I don’t read a lot of books with spooky or supernatural stuff in them. I’ve already written about Sookie Stackhouse (vampires! werewolves! all sorts!) and I’ve put more links to Terry Pratchett recently than I can shake a stick at (but I’ll throw you some more). But tangential thinking takes me to another Charlaine Harris series – albeit one that doesn’t have any supernatural shenanigans.

When we meet Aurora Teagarden in the first book, she’s a librarian in Lawrenceston, Georgia. Along with some of her friends, she’s part of a Real Murder club – who meet every month to discuss and analyse famous true crimes. Her mum doesn’t approve, but Aurora doesn’t see any harm in it until a member gets murdered – and the other group members are suspects. Of course she solves the murder, but it’s just the start because over the course of ten books she just keeps stumbling across bodies and murderers!

If you like cozy crime and you like Charlaine Harris, these will really work for you. I find Harris incredibly easy to read and her mystery plots are pretty solid. I can sometimes figure out who did it, but not always, and not usually particularly early in the book, and you can’t say that about everyone! Aurora is an engaging heroine and she manages not to fall into the too-stupid-to-live trap too often – and I like the slightly antagonistic relationship she has with the local police because it’s not *just* about the fact that she keeps poking her nose into their investigations – although that is also a factor. Sidenote: some series are better at managing the amateur and the police relationships than others – some go too cozy (why aren’t they bothered this person is inserting themselves?) or some too antagonistic (which is just anxiety inducing for the reader and not what I come to cozy crime for).

Anyway, I have one proviso to mention with this series; and that’s that the final two books were written after a considerable gap and are… perhaps not one hundred percent consistent with some aspects of the earlier stories but that’s probably only something oyu would notice if you really did binge-read these from start to finish. As to why there was such a big gap – or rather why Charlaine Harris came back to the series, well I would point the finger at the success of the Hallmark Movie versions of the books – which again, are not entirely consistent with the books but are among the better cozy crime TV adaptations that I’ve watched (and I’ve watched a few) and you can pretty much just see them as a separate thing.

They should be fairly easy to get hold of on Kindle, and there were definitely fairly comprehensive paperback releases of the first eight in the series (because that’s how i read them – from the works or the library) and the kindles have new covers now which suggests there may have also been a release at some point.

Happy Weekend everyone!

books, series

Mystery series: Mitchell and Markby

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So as I discovered earlier this month that there is a new book in the series after a nearly 20 year gap, so this week’s I’ve taken the opportunity to write about Ann Granger’s 1990s cozy detective series.

The Mitchell and Markby of the title are Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby. She is a civil servant for the Foreign Office who has spent several years working abroad and he is a Detective Chief Inspector. When they meet in the first book, Meredith is visiting Alan’s Cotswold patch to attend a wedding, but they become friends (ahem) and she starts visiting him and eventually she settles in the area as a base from her foreign postings. They’re both slightly older than a lot of cozy crime duos and if I remember correctly quite cautious about the possibility of a romantic relationship. The mysteries are good – police procedurals of the old school sort (ie not thrillers or psychological) and obviously contemporary to the time that they were written.

I read the first 15 books seven years ago, having borrowed the paperbacks from a friend and gave them back to her afterwards – I was delighted to spot a couple of them in Waterstone’s Gower Street this week but it’s the first time I’ve seen any in yonks. But the good news is that they’re all available in nice shiny Kindle editions – some of them at a really reasonable price. The cheapest is the latest one – 99p! – but I really do suggest you start with some of the earlier ones to get the best sense of the series. If you like American cozy series – or like watching TV series like Midsummer Murders, these would be a good options for you. Granger has a couple of other series too – I’ve read about half of her Campbell and Carter series which she wrote after the Mitchell and Markbys, and I’ve read one of her Lizzie Carter series, which are set in the Victorian period. Gower Street actually had quite a good selection the other day – so you never know, I may go back and fill in some gaps!

Happy reading!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in publishing

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As well as one of us is famous romances, the other theme of this summer’s romances (or at least the ones that I’ve read) seems to be romances where people work in publishing. So after the Neigbor Favor this week, The Seven Year Slip the week before, and Business or Pleasure the one before that (!) here are a few more books where at least one of the main characters works in publishing. I’m going to start with romances because hey that’s the trend, but there are also a couple of books in other genres I want to mention too.

Lets start with the obvious one on the romance front- which may also be the one which started the trend (or at least accelerated it) Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I did a post about it last year when it came out, so you can read that for more details, but it sees a high powered literary agent find herself on holiday at the same place as her work nemesis only to discover that they might have more in common than they think.

Business or Pleasure features a disillusioned ghost writer – and if you haven’t already, Ashley Poston’s (as in Seven Year Slip) previous novel, the Dead Romantics also featured a ghostwriter – this time one with a deadline she can’t make and a family emergency she can’t avoid. And as you might remember when I was writing about Seven Year Slip, it’s playing with ghosts – ghost writer and actual ghosts get it! And a late entry because I finished it this week – Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game, which is about two coworkers at a publishing company who really, really hate each other and are fighting for the same promotion. Now I have some caveats: I have a few issues with it but in the end they actually weren’t about what I was expecting – which was that their work rivalry would push my buttons for unprofessional pranks, but it actually didn’t because they didn’t sabotage each other. Lucinda does freak out a lot though and that did get on my nerves a bit so your mileage may vary – Goodreads tells me most people adore it and it’s also been turned into a film!

On to crime now and I’ve mentioned Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland books – aka The Magpie Murders and The Moonflower Murders a few times now (and I’m still hoping for a third book) and there’s also the Hawthorne series of even more meta mysteries from Horowitz. But there’s also Judith Flanders’ A Murder of Magpies. I read it back in 2015 back in the early days of this blog, when I was also reviewing for Novelicious – and wrote about it there rather than here so I’ll give you a quick review. Our detective is Sam, an editor at a London publishing house who thinks her biggest problem is that the new manuscript from her star author is unpublishable – until a police officer turns up asking about a parcel addressed to her. It’s not quite as cosy as the cover might make you expect but it is totally engrossing and has a clever and inventive solution (albeit one that this humanities grad had to read a couple of times). There is a great cast of supporting characters being set up for the series. I read it back when it was released – and there are now four in the series so I may have to get hold of some of the others as I had completely forgotten about how much I’d enjoyed it until I started checking my lists for this post!

I’m absolutely positive that I’ve forgotten something that I should have included, but hopefully it’ll come back to me at somepoint.

Happy Humpday everyone!