A bonus review today – that’s breaking some of my rules because this is the fifth in a series. But it doesn’t actually matree because this is the first in Lee Hollis’s Desert Flowers Mystery series that I’ve read. Interestingly I’ve read a couple of novellas by this author and one novel in a different series previously and wasn’t keen, but this really worked for me.
The set up is this: Poppy Harmon is a former actress who has been forced out of retired life to become a private investigator and runs a detective agency with two friends. In this instalment, one of Poppy’s former acting rivals has reappeared in her life. Serena has asked the agency to do an urgent background check on her husband to be. It seems easily done – but then Serena is found standing over a dead body holding a smoking gun and the team find themselves caught up in the investigation.
This has plenty of action, lots of twists and is really easy and fun to read. I thought I had the solution figured out – but I wasn’t entirely right and I liked that too. My copy came from NetGalley – and I even managed to read it in a timely manner! Even better, some of the earlier books in the series are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment (although not the first one) so I can go and read some more. I love it when that happens.
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.
This Friday I’m talking about a distinctly bingeable series, which has a new instalment out this week – even if my preorder hasn’t arrived yet – it’s Kate Carlisle’s Fixer-Upper mysteries.
The set up for these is a good one: Shannon Hammer is a building contractor in coastal California, having taken over her father’s business when he retired for health reasons. She’s lived in Lighthouse Cove all her life and has a group of close friends as well as family living there. There’s an old classmate from high school who is always out to make trouble for her and divide in town between the people who live there year round and the seasonal folks which adds a bit of friction on top of the regular appearance of bodies. In the first book in the series the town’s police chief is a new arrival and there’s also a crime writer who has just moved to the area as well. So there are plenty of regular characters and lots of options for the mystery plots.
I recommended the first in the series, A High End Finish, when I read it back in January, and since then I’ve read the other eight that were already published – which is the very definition of a binge! Without giving too much away, the romantic subplot in this doesn’t go the way that I was expecting/fearing from the first book, and in the later books some of the issues I had with the resolution of the first one are ironed out. Lighthouse Cove keeps developing new historic buildings or sites to facilitate plots, which is amusing but also keeps the series from feeling repetitive if you’re reading them one after another. Basically they’re fun, solidly plotted cozy crimes with a good heroine – and that’s actually harder to find that you’d think at the moment!
I think you’re going to have to order these in from the book giant – I picked up the first nine secondhand from a book group I’m in on Facebook and I preordered the latest from Amazon to complete the set.
Having mentioned the Singaporean super rich in last week’s Recommendsday, today I’m returning to the city for a mystery series and Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee books.
Rosie Lee is a widowed lady of a certain age, who runs a home cooking restaurant. She doesn’t need to work – her husband left her plenty of money – she does it keep her busy and because it helps her keep her finger on exactly what’s going on in the city. In the first book, two women are found dead and as she knows both of them – one has eaten at her restaurants, the other had been due to be a guest at a dinner party – she starts to investigate. This sets up both the way Aunty Lee straddles different parts of Singaporean society but also how she meets the police officer who appears through the series.
The mysteries aren’t always the most complicated – I’ve figured out the culprit fairly early more than once – but Aunty Lee’s and her world is a delightful space to spend time that it doesn’t actually matter. If you liked the world of Crazy Rich Asians, this is the cozy crime version of that except that I need to issue a warning: these books will make you hungry. The presence of food in a cozy crime series is nothing new – I mean lots of series have recipes included after all – but very few of them make your mouth water the way that Ovidia Yu’s do – even if you’re like me and you know that your chili tolerance is not enough to be able to cope with some of it! I have written about a couple of these before – there’s more about Aunty Lee in the posts about Deadly Specials and Meddling and Murder (which doesn’t seem to be attached to the series on any of the online vendors, even though it is and Aunty Lee book as you can see from the cover).
These are all available on Kindle and Kobo – and yes it really annoys me that the covers don’t match as a set – and I’ve occasionally spotted them in shops, I own one in paperback because of that!
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.
I nearly picked the Diane Mott Davison today, even though I finished it on the train on Monday morning, but you never know what’s going to happen in a week, and I did really enjoy the Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras, so I’m going for that today, but I suspect this isn’t the last time I’ll mention Diane Mott Davison.
Hubert Schuze runs a shop selling Native American pottery in New Mexico. Officially that is. Unofficially he’s also an illegal pot hunter – after all that’s what got him kicked out of university – so perhaps it’s not a surprise when a mysterious man offers him $25,000 to steal a pot. Except that this pot isn’t on a reserve, it’s in a museum – so it’s proper stealing. But the money is tempting, so he goes to scope out the museum, but when he returns to his shop he finds an agent accusing him of stealing a different ancient pot. And then he’s accused of murder. It’s all getting a little bit out of hand – will Hubie manage to escape jail and make sure that the culprit doesn’t?
This fits into the not-quite-the-right-side-of-the-law adventure caper genre, if such a thing exists. Think Ranger from Steph Plum – but before he started his security company and with pottery. Or a Karl Hiassen novel – but with a lot less death and destruction. Like a cozy crime that’s gone a bit rogue. Think John Smythe from Vicky Bliss if he owned a shop in New Mexico and specialised accordingly, and his friends call him Hubie. You get the picture. And it does exactly what you want it to – there’s a very tight spot for Hubert to try and get out of – hopefully in one piece and preferably coming out with a profit of some sort. Or at least something to try to sell. It is a lot of fun – and it’s the first in a series so I will try and remember to report back on whether it manages to keep the momentum going!
This is easiest to get hold of in ebook – and it’s actually cheaper on Kobo than Kindle at the moment although in terms of my target prices for ebooks both prices are a bit high at time of writing for what is a cozy crime adventure caper. It is also available in paperback form, but the prices are (even more) eye-watering for that!
So it was Pancake Day yesterday – aka Shrove Tuesday – and it’s Ash Wednesday today so it seemed like a good time to recommend some novels where food is a strong theme.
This post actually grew out of an idea to write a Recommendsday for books set in Lent, but I could only really come up with Joanne Harris’s Chocolat. If you’ve never read the book, it starts at the end of Carnival – just before the start of Lent – when Vianne and her daughter arrive in a small French town and open a chocolate shop, to the horror of the local priest, because Lent is the season for self denial. And it all goes from there. I’ve read it several times – and have the sequels too – and it would be a great read for this time of year. But that’s when I got stuck for books about Lent, so I picked up the food theme of the chocolate shop and ran with that instead!
Next up is an author I don’t think I have mentioned here before – Anthony Capella. And I think that’s probably because he hasn’t written anything under that name* for about a decade. But there are five really good mainly historical novels with food at the heart of them – one about ice cream, one about coffee and several set in Italy. If you’ve never come across him before, you should take a look – they’re all available in ebook, which is probably the easiest way to get hold of them.
If you want some slightly more recent fiction, there is Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. I really liked the start of this, but then our heroine starts making some stupid decisions and lost me. But it was one of those “book of the summer” type picks in the US a few years back – so it’s one of those literary fiction type picks that work for other people better than they work for me if that makes sense.
Now obviously there are a lot of cozy crime novels with food. So many of them and they often/usually have actual recipes in them too even if the quantities are all in American measurements (so imprecise when it comes to baking, how does anything ever rise?). I’ve written about the Cupcake Bakery and the Maine Clambake mysteries, but there’s also Joanne Fluke’s long running Hannah Swenson series about a baker who keeps stumbling across murders and Wendy Tyson’s Greenhouse Mysteries feature a farm that has a farm-to-table restaurant and comes with recipes. I’ve been trying out a couple of new to me cozy series over the last few weeks, so watch this space for more suggestions there too.
Happy Wednesday everyone!
*He’s currently writing thrillers under a different name.
I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to writing a Series I Love post about one of my favourite series, but here we are. I had planned this for December, but when I went back to read the first in the series again in preparation for this post it started the massive binge that you’ve seen evidence off in all the week in books and stats posts ever since and so this has had to wait until I finished that, because it’s only fair.
Meg Langslow is a blacksmith based in Virginia. When we meet her in book one, Murder with Peacocks, she’s living in Yorktown, but she moves to the fictional town of Caerphilly fairly early in the series where there is much more scope for Donna Andrews to create plots and drama! The first book sees Meg and her notebook that tells her when to breathe trying to organise three weddings at the same time, including her brother’s. The murder side of the book is very good, but also so is the world building which seems Andrews introduce the core of the regular characters who appear throughout the series. There is Meg’s bossy mum, her murder mystery obsessed retired doctor father, her creative but scatty brother Rob and Michael, the son of the dressmaker in charge of all the dresses. As we go through the series the regular crew gets bigger as the world expands.
There are now 32 books in the series, with a thirty third coming in summer 2023, and having reread them all basically back to back, what has impressed me is the consistency of Donna Andrews’ world building. Yes there are a few little fudges here and there, but if you weren’t binging the lot at once you wouldn’t notice them. And you don’t get fed up of the characters, or notice that there’s a formula the way you do with some other series that have run this long.
Looking back, I think that one of the smartest moves Andrews made was not marrying Meg and Michael off too quickly and then giving them a house that allowed plenty of options in terms of plot and house guests. Not every book is based in Caerphilly, but even when they are, there are enough different locations (and reasons for Meg being there) that it doesn’t feel like Meg is the problem (I’m looking at you Jessica Fletcher) or that she’s meddling unnecessarily. And because she has several different professional hats, you don’t worry how she’s stayed in business with all these bodies piling up!
Having read them all again, I think my favourites are probably Owls Well that Ends Well, Some Like It Hawk, The Nightingale Before Christmas and maybe Murder Most Fowl. But it’s hard to decide because they’re all good and it turns out they repay rereading. I’ve already written about a few of the others elsewhere as well – Terns of Endearment in the Cruise Ship post, Gone Gull was a BotW, Gift of the Magpie was in a Christmas round-up as was How the Finch Stole Christmas.
If you want to read them, the good news is that the first one is now available in ebook (it wasn’t when I started reading the series) so that is much easier to get hold of than you might expect for a 20 year old cozy crime book, but the next one after that that is on Kindle is the 9th book. Luckily, Murder with Peacocks is that rare thing – a first in series cozy crime that sets up a world very well and has a good mystery. You can find the link to the Kindle books here, the Kobo ones here and they’re also available in Apple books too. Try not to look at how much it would cost you to buy them 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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 